(upbeat electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Again, all day wall-to-wall coverage, just had a great interview with Walmart, we've got a Next interview coming up, you're going to hear from Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, two experts, both experienced entrepreneurs, executives in technology. We're here to break down what just happened with Walmart, and what's coming up with George Gilbert, former colleague, Wikibon analyst, Gartner Analyst, and now independent investor and expert. George, great to see you, I know you're following this space. Like you read about it, remember the first days when Dataverse came out, we were talking about them coming out of Berkeley? >> Dave: Snowflake. >> John: Snowflake. >> Dave: Snowflake In the early days. >> We, collectively, have been chronicling the data movement since 2010, you were part of our team, now you've got your nose to the grindstone, you're seeing the next wave. What's this all about? Walmart building their own super cloud, we got Bob Muglia talking about how these next wave of apps are coming. What are the super apps? What's the super cloud to you? >> Well, this key's off Dave's really interesting questions to Walmart, which was like, how are they building their supercloud? 'Cause it makes a concrete example. But what was most interesting about his description of the Walmart WCMP, I forgot what it stood for. >> Dave: Walmart Cloud Native Platform. >> Walmart, okay. He was describing where the logic could run in these stateless containers, and maybe eventually serverless functions. But that's just it, and that's the paradigm of microservices, where the logic is in this stateless thing, where you can shoot it, or it fails, and you can spin up another one, and you've lost nothing. >> That was their triplet model. >> Yeah, in fact, and that was what they were trying to move to, where these things move fluidly between data centers. >> But there's a but, right? Which is they're all stateless apps in the cloud. >> George: Yeah. >> And all their stateful apps are on-prem and VMs. >> Or the stateful part of the apps are in VMs. >> Okay. >> And so if they really want to lift their super cloud layer off of this different provider's infrastructure, they're going to need a much more advanced software platform that manages data. And that goes to the -- >> Muglia and Handy, that you and I did, that's coming up next. So the big takeaway there, George, was, I'll set it up and you can chime in, a new breed of data apps is emerging, and this highly decentralized infrastructure. And Tristan Handy of DBT Labs has a sort of a solution to begin the journey today, Muglia is working on something that's way out there, describe what you learned from it. >> Okay. So to talk about what the new data apps are, and then the platform to run them, I go back to the using what will probably be seen as one of the first data app examples, was Uber, where you're describing entities in the real world, riders, drivers, routes, city, like a city plan, these are all defined by data. And the data is described in a structure called a knowledge graph, for lack of a, no one's come up with a better term. But that means the tough, the stuff that Jack built, which was all stateless and sits above cloud vendors' infrastructure, it needs an entirely different type of software that's much, much harder to build. And the way Bob described it is, you're going to need an entirely new data management infrastructure to handle this. But where, you know, we had this really colorful interview where it was like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em, but they weren't really that much in opposition to each other, because Tristan is going to define this layer, starting with like business intelligence metrics, where you're defining things like bookings, billings, and revenue, in business terms, not in SQL terms -- >> Well, business terms, if I can interrupt, he said the one thing we haven't figured out how to APIify is KPIs that sit inside of a data warehouse, and that's essentially what he's doing. >> George: That's what he's doing, yes. >> Right. And so then you can now expose those APIs, those KPIs, that sit inside of a data warehouse, or a data lake, a data store, whatever, through APIs. >> George: And the difference -- >> So what does that do for you? >> Okay, so all of a sudden, instead of working at technical data terms, where you're dealing with tables and columns and rows, you're dealing instead with business entities, using the Uber example of drivers, riders, routes, you know, ETA prices. But you can define, DBT will be able to define those progressively in richer terms, today they're just doing things like bookings, billings, and revenue. But Bob's point was, today, the data warehouse that actually runs that stuff, whereas DBT defines it, the data warehouse that runs it, you can't do it with relational technology >> Dave: Relational totality, cashing architecture. >> SQL, you can't -- >> SQL caching architectures in memory, you can't do it, you've got to rethink down to the way the data lake is laid out on the disk or cache. Which by the way, Thomas Hazel, who's speaking later, he's the chief scientist and founder at Chaos Search, he says, "I've actually done this," basically leave it in an S3 bucket, and I'm going to query it, you know, with no caching. >> All right, so what I hear you saying then, tell me if I got this right, there are some some things that are inadequate in today's world, that's not compatible with the Supercloud wave. >> Yeah. >> Specifically how you're using storage, and data, and stateful. >> Yes. >> And then the software that makes it run, is that what you're saying? >> George: Yeah. >> There's one other thing you mentioned to me, it's like, when you're using a CRM system, a human is inputting data. >> George: Nothing happens till the human does something. >> Right, nothing happens until that data entry occurs. What you're talking about is a world that self forms, polling data from the transaction system, or the ERP system, and then builds a plan without human intervention. >> Yeah. Something in the real world happens, where the user says, "I want a ride." And then the software goes out and says, "Okay, we got to match a driver to the rider, we got to calculate how long it takes to get there, how long to deliver 'em." That's not driven by a form, other than the first person hitting a button and saying, "I want a ride." All the other stuff happens autonomously, driven by data and analytics. >> But my question was different, Dave, so I want to get specific, because this is where the startups are going to come in, this is the disruption. Snowflake is a data warehouse that's in the cloud, they call it a data cloud, they refactored it, they did it differently, the success, we all know it looks like. These areas where it's inadequate for the future are areas that'll probably be either disrupted, or refactored. What is that? >> That's what Muglia's contention is, that the DBT can start adding that layer where you define these business entities, they're like mini digital twins, you can define them, but the data warehouse isn't strong enough to actually manage and run them. And Muglia is behind a company that is rethinking the database, really in a fundamental way that hasn't been done in 40 or 50 years. It's the first, in his contention, the first real rethink of database technology in a fundamental way since the rise of the relational database 50 years ago. >> And I think you admit it's a real Hail Mary, I mean it's quite a long shot right? >> George: Yes. >> Huge potential. >> But they're pretty far along. >> Well, we've been talking on theCUBE for 12 years, and what, 10 years going to AWS Reinvent, Dave, that no one database will rule the world, Amazon kind of showed that with them. What's different, is it databases are changing, or you can have multiple databases, or? >> It's a good question. And the reason we've had multiple different types of databases, each one specialized for a different type of workload, but actually what Muglia is behind is a new engine that would essentially, you'll never get rid of the data warehouse, or the equivalent engine in like a Databricks datalake house, but it's a new engine that manages the thing that describes all the data and holds it together, and that's the new application platform. >> George, we have one minute left, I want to get real quick thought, you're an investor, and we know your history, and the folks watching, George's got a deep pedigree in investment data, and we can testify against that. If you're going to invest in a company right now, if you're a customer, I got to make a bet, what does success look like for me, what do I want walking through my door, and what do I want to send out? What companies do I want to look at? What's the kind of of vendor do I want to evaluate? Which ones do I want to send home? >> Well, the first thing a customer really has to do when they're thinking about next gen applications, all the people have told you guys, "we got to get our data in order," getting that data in order means building an integrated view of all your data landscape, which is data coming out of all your applications. It starts with the data model, so, today, you basically extract data from all your operational systems, put it in this one giant, central place, like a warehouse or lake house, but eventually you want this, whether you call it a fabric or a mesh, it's all the data that describes how everything hangs together as in one big knowledge graph. There's different ways to implement that. And that's the most critical thing, 'cause that describes your Uber landscape, your Uber platform. >> That's going to power the digital transformation, which will power the business transformation, which powers the business model, which allows the builders to build -- >> Yes. >> Coders to code. That's Supercloud application. >> Yeah. >> George, great stuff. Next interview you're going to see right here is Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy, they're going to unpack this new wave. Great segment, really worth unpacking and reading between the lines with George, and Dave Vellante, and those two great guests. And then we'll come back here for the studio for more of the live coverage of Supercloud 2. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this exclusive Cube Conversation. We have the pleasure today to welcome, Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of software development at Oracle. Wim, it's good to see you. How you been, sir? >> Good, it's been a while since we last talked but I'm excited to be here, as always. >> It was during COVID though and so I hope to see you face to face soon. But so Wim, since the Barron's Article declared Oracle a Cloud giant, we've really been sort of paying attention and amping up our coverage of Oracle and asking a lot of questions like, is Oracle really a Cloud giant? And I'll say this, we've always stressed that Oracle invests in R&D and of course there's a lot of D in that equation. And over the past year, we've seen, of course the autonomous database is ramping up, especially notable on Exadata Cloud@Customer, we've covered that extensively. We covered the autonomous data warehouse announcement, the blockchain piece, which of course got me excited 'cause I get to talk about crypto with Juan. Roving Edge, which for everybody who might not be familiar with that, it's an edge cloud service, dedicated regions that you guys announced, which is a managed cloud region. And so it's clear, you guys are serious about cloud. These are all cloud first services using second gen OCI. So, Oracle's making some moves but the question is, what are customers doing? Are they buying this stuff? Are they leaning into these new deployment models for the databases? What can you tell us? >> You know, definitely. And I think, you know, the reason that we have so many different services is that not every customer is the same, right? One of the things that people don't necessarily realize, I guess, is in the early days of cloud lots of startups went there because they had no local infrastructure. It was easy for them to get started in something completely new. Our customers are mostly enterprise customers that have huge data centers in many cases, they have lots of real estate local. And when they think about cloud they're wondering how can we create an environment that doesn't cause us to have two ops teams and two ways of managing things. And so, they're trying to figure out exactly what it means to take their real estate and either move it wholesale to the cloud over a period of years, or they say, "Hey, some of these things need to be local maybe even for regulatory purposes." Or just because they want to keep some data locally within their own data centers but then they have to move other things remotely. And so, there's many different ways of solving the problem. And you can't just say, "Here's one cloud, this is where you go and that's it." So, we basically say, if you're on prem, we provide you with cloud services on-premises, like dedicated regions or Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer and so forth so that you get the benefits of what we built for cloud and spend a lot of time on, but you can run them in your own data center or people say, "No, no, no. I want to get rid of my data centers, I do it remotely." Okay, then you do it in Oracle cloud directly. Or you have a hybrid model where you say, "Some stays local, some is remote." The nice thing is you get the exact same API, the exact same way of managing things, no matter how you deploy it. And that's a big differentiator. >> So, is it fair to say that you guys have, I think of it as a purpose built club, 'cause I talk to a lot of customers. I mean, take an insurance app like Claims, and customers tell me, "I'm not putting that into the public cloud." But you're making a case that it actually might make sense in your cloud because you can support those mission critical applications with the exact same experience, same API, same... I can get, you know, take Rack for instance, I can't get, you know, real application clusters in an Amazon cloud but presumably I can get them in your cloud. So, is it fair to say you have a purpose built cloud specifically for the most demanding applications? Is that a right way to look at it or not necessarily? >> Well, it's interesting. I think the thing to be careful of is, I guess, purpose built cloud might for some people mean, "Oh, you can only do things if it's Oracle centric." Right, and so I think that fundamentally, Oracle cloud provides a generic cloud. You can run anything you want, any application, any deployment model that you have. Whether you're an Oracle customer or not, we provide you with a full cloud service, right? However, given that we know and have known, obviously for a long time, how our products run best, when we designed OCI gen two, when we designed the networking stack, the storage layer and all that stuff, we made sure that it would be capable of running our more complex environments because our advantage is, Oracle customers have a place where they can run Oracle the best. Right, and so obviously the context of purpose-built fits that model, where yes, we've made some design choices that allow us to run Rack inside OCI and allow us to deploy Exadatas inside OCI which you cannot do in other clouds. So yes, it's purpose built in that sense but I would caution on the side of that it sometimes might imply that it's unique to Oracle products and I guess one way to look at it is if you can run Oracle, you can run everything else, right? Because it's such a complex suite of products that if you can run that then it it'll support any other (mumbling). >> Right. Right, it's like New York city. You make it there, you can make it anywhere. If I can run the most demanding mission critical applications, well, then I can run a web app for instance, okay. I got a question on tooling 'cause there's a lot of tooling, like sometimes it makes my eyes bleed when I look at all this stuff and doesn't... Square the circle for me, doesn't autonomous, an autonomous database like Autonomous Linux, for instance, doesn't it eliminate the need for all these management tools? >> You know, it does. It eliminates the need for the management at the lower level, right. So, with the autonomous Linux, what we offer and what we do is, we automatically patch the operating system for you and make sure it's secure from a security patching point of view. We eliminate the downtime, so when we do it then you don't have to restart applications. However, we don't know necessarily what the app is that is installed on top of it. You know, people can deploy their own applications, they can run third party applications, they can use it for development environments and so forth. So, there's sort of the core operating system layer and on the database side, you know, we take care of database patching and upgrades and storage management and all that stuff. So the same thing, if you run your own application inside the database, we can manage the database portion but we don't manage the application portion just like on the operating system. And so, there's still a management level that's required, no matter what, a level above that. And the other thing and I think this is what a lot of the stuff we're doing is based on is, you still have tons of stuff on-premises that needs full management. You have applications that you migrate that are not running Autonomous Linux, could be a Windows application that's running or it could be something on a different Linux distribution or you could still have some databases installed that you manage yourself, you don't want to use the autonomous or you're on a third-party. And so we want to make sure that we can address all of them with a single set of tools, right. >> Okay, so I wonder, can you give us just an overview, just briefly of the products that comprise into the cloud services, your management solution, what's in that portfolio? How should we think about it? >> Yeah, so it basically starts with Enterprise Manager on-premises, right? Which has been the tool that our Oracle database customers in particular have been using for many years and is widely used by our customer base. And so you have those customers, most of their real estate is on-premises and they can use enterprise management with local. They have it running and they don't want to change. They can keep doing that and we keep enhancing as you know, with newer versions of Enterprise Manager getting better. So, then there's the transition to cloud and so what we've been doing over the last several years is basically, looking at the things, well, one aspect is looking at things people, likes of Enterprise Manager and make sure that we provide similar functionality in Oracle cloud. So, we have Performance Hub for looking at how the database performance is working. We have APM for Application Performance Monitoring, we have Logging Analytics that looks at all the different log files and helps make sense of it for you. We have Database Management. So, a lot of the functionality that people like in Enterprise Manager mentioned the database that we've built into Oracle cloud, and, you know, a number of other things that are coming Operations Insights, to look at how databases are performing and how we can potentially do consolidation and stuff. So we've basically looked at what people have been using on-premises, how we can replicate that in Oracle cloud and then also, when you're in a cloud, how you can make make use of all the base services that a cloud vendor provides, telemetry, logging and so forth. And so, it's a broad portfolio and what it allows us to do with our customers is say, "Look, if you're predominantly on-prem, you want to stay there, keep using Enterprise Manager. If you're starting to move to Oracle cloud, you can first use EM, look at what's happening in the cloud and then switch over, start using all the management products we have in the cloud and let go of the Enterprise Manager instance on-premise. So you can gradually shift, you can start using more and more. Maybe you start with analytics first and then you start with insights and then you switch to database management. So there's a whole suite of possibilities. >> (indistinct) you mentioned APM, I've been watching that space, it's really evolved. I mean, you saw, you know, years ago, Splunk came out with sort of log analytics, maybe simplified that a little bit, now you're seeing some open source stuff come out. You're seeing a lot of startups come out, you saw Cisco made an acquisition with AppD and that whole space is transforming it seems that the future is all about that end to end visibility, simplifying the ability to remediate problems. And I'm thinking, okay, you just mentioned, you guys have a lot of these capabilities, you got Autonomous, is that sort of where you're headed with your capabilities? >> It definitely is and in fact, one of the... So, you know, APM allows you to say, "Hey, here's my web browser and it's making a connection to the database, to a middle tier" and it's hard for operations people in companies to say, hey, the end user calls and says, "You know, my order entry system is slow. Is it the browser? Is it the middle tier that they connect to? Is it the database that's overloaded in the backend?" And so, APM helps you with tracing, you know, what happens from where to where, where the delays are. Now, once you know where the delay is, you need to drill down on it. And then you need to go look at log files. And that's where the logging piece comes in. And what happens very often is that these log files are very difficult to read. You have networking log files and you have database log files and you have reslog files and you almost have to be an expert in all of these things. And so, then with Logging Analytics, we basically provide sort of an expert dashboard system on top of that, that allows us to say, "Hey! When you look at logging for the network stack, here are the most important errors that we could find." So you don't have to go and learn all the details of these things. And so, the real advantages of saying, "Hey, we have APM, we have Logging Analytics, we can tie the two together." Right, and so we can provide a solution that actually helps solve the problem, rather than, you need to use APM for one vendor, you need to use Logging Analytics from another vendor and you know, that doesn't necessarily work very well. >> Yeah and that's why you're seeing with like the ELK Stack it's cool, you're an open source guy, it's cool as an open source, but it's complicated to set up all that that brings. So, that's kind of a cool approach that you guys are taking. You mentioned Enterprise Manager, you just made a recent announcement, a new release. What's new in that new release? >> So Enterprise Manager 13.5 just got released. And so EM keeps improving, right? We've made a lot of changes over over the years and one of the things we've done in recent years is do more frequent updates sort of the cloud model frequent updates that are not just bug fixes but also introduce new functionality so people get more stuff more frequently rather than you know, once a year. And that's certainly been very attractive because it shows that it's a lively evolving product. And one of the main focus areas of course is cloud. And so a lot of work that happens in Enterprise Manager is hybrid cloud, which basically means I run Enterprise Manager and I have some stuff in Oracle cloud, I might have some other stuff in another cloud vendors environment and so we can actually see which databases are where and provide you with one consolidated view and one tool, right? And of course it supports Autonomous Database and Exadata in cloud servers and so forth. So you can from EM see both your databases on-premises and also how it's doing in in Oracle cloud as you potentially migrate things over. So that's one aspect. And then the other one is in terms of operations and automation. One of the things that we started doing again with Enterprise Manager in the last few years is making sure that everything has a REST API. So we try to make the experience with Enterprise Manager be very similar to how people work with a cloud service. Most folks now writing automation tools are used to calling REST APIs. EM in the early days didn't have REST APIs, now we're making sure everything works that way. And one of the advantages is that we can do extensibility without having to rewrite the product, that we just add the API clause in the agent and it makes it a lot easier to become part of the modern system. Another thing that we introduced last year but that we're evolving with more dashboards and so forth is the Grafana plugin. So even though Enterprise Manager provides lots of cool tools, a lot of cloud operations folks use a tool called Grafana. And so we provide a plugin that allows customers to have Grafana dashboards but the data actually comes out of Enterprise Manager. So that allows us to integrate EM into a more cloudy world in a cloud environment. I think the other important part is making sure that again, Enterprise Manager has sort of a cloud feel to it. So when you do patching and upgrades, it's near zero downtime which basically means that we do all the upgrades for you without having to bring EM down. Because even though it's a management tool, it's used for operations. So if there were downtime for patching Enterprise Manager for an hour, then for that hour, it's a blackout window for all the monitoring we do. And so we want to avoid that from happening, so now EM is upgrading, even though all the events are still happening and being processed, and then we do a very short switch. So that help our operations people to be more available. >> Yes. I mean, I've been talking about Automated Operations since, you know, lights out data centers since the eighties back in (laughs). I remember (indistinct) data center one-time lights out there were storage tech libraries in there and so... But there were a lot of unintended consequences around, you know, automated ops, and so people were sort of scared to go there, at least lean in too much but now with all this machine intelligence... So you're talking about ops automation, you mentioned the REST APIs, the Grafana plugins, the Cloud feel, is that what you're bringing to the table that's unique, is that unique to Oracle? >> Well, the integration with Oracle in that sense is unique. So one example is you mentioned the word migration, right? And so database migration tends to be something, you know, customers obviously take very serious. We go from one place, you have to move all your data to another place that runs in a slightly different environment. And so how do you know whether that migration is going to work? And you can't migrate a thousand databases manually, right? So automation, again, it's not just... Automation is not just to say, "Hey, I can do an upgrade of a system or I can make sure that nothing is done by hand when you patch something." It's more about having a huge fleet of servers and a huge fleet of databases. How can you move something from one place to another and automate that? And so with EM, you know, we start with sort of the prerequisite phase. So we're looking at the existing environment, how much memory does it need? How much storage does it use? Which version of the database does it have? How much data is there to move? Then on the target side, we see whether the target can actually run in that environment. Then we go and look at, you know, how do you want to migrate? Do you want to migrate everything from a sort of a physical model or do you want to migrate it from a logical model? Do you want to do it while your environment is still running so that you start backing up the data to the target database while your existing production system is still running? Then we do a short switch afterwards, or you say, "No, I want to bring my database down. I want to do the migrate and then bring it back up." So there's different deployment models that we can let our customers pick. And then when the migration is done, we have a ton of health checks that can validate whether the target database will run through basically the exact same way. And then you can say, "I want to migrate 10 databases or 50 databases" and it'll work, It's all automated out of the box. >> So you're saying, I mean, you've looked at the prevailing way you've done migrations, historically you'd have to freeze the code and then migrate, and it would take forever, it was a function of the number of lines of code you had. And then a lot of times, you know, people would say, "We're not going to freeze the code" and then they would almost go out of business trying to merge the two. You're saying in 2021, you can give customers the choice, you can migrate, you could change the, you know, refuel the plane while you're in midair? Is that essentially what you're saying? >> That's a good way of describing it, yeah. So your existing database is running and we can do a logical backup and restore. So while transactions are happening we're still migrating it over and then you can do a cutoff. It makes the transition a lot easier. But the other thing is that in the past, migrations would typically be two things. One is one database version to the next, more upgrades than migration. Then the second one is that old hardware or a different CPU architecture are moving to newer hardware in a new CPU architecture. Those were sort of the typical migrations that you had prior to Cloud. And from a CIS admin point of view or a DBA it was all something you could touch, that you could physically touch the boxes. When you move to cloud, it's this nebulous thing somewhere in a data center that you have no access to. And that by itself creates a barrier to a lot of admins and DBA's from saying, "Oh, it'll be okay." There's a lot of concern. And so by baking in all these tests and the prerequisites and all the dashboards to say, you know, "This is what you use. These are the features you use. We know that they're available on the other side so you can do the migration." It helps solve some of these problems and remove the barriers. >> Well that was just kind of same same vision when you guys came up with it. I don't know, quite a while ago now. And it took a while to get there with, you know, you had gen one and then gen two but that is, I think, unique to Oracle. I know maybe some others that are trying to do that as well, but you were really the first to do that and so... I want to switch topics to talk about security. It's hot topic. You guys, you know, like many companies really focused on security. Does Enterprise Manager bring any of that over? I mean, the prevailing way to do security often times is to do scripts and write, you know, custom security policy scripts are fragile, they break, what can you tell us about security? >> Yeah. So there's really two things, you know. One is, we obviously have our own best security practices. How we run a database inside Oracle for our own world, we've learned about that over the years. And so we sort of baked that knowledge into Enterprise Manager. So we can say, "Hey, if you install this way, we do the install and the configuration based on our best practice." That's one thing. The other one is there's STIG, there's PCI and they're ShipBob, those are the main ones. And so customers can do their own way. They can download the documentation and do it manually. But what we've done is, and we've done this for a long time, is basically bake those policies into Enterprise Manager. So you can say, "Here's my database this needs to be PCI compliant or it needs to be HIPAA compliant and you push a button and then we validate the policies in those documents or in those prescript described files. And we make sure that the database is combined to that. And so we take that manual work and all that stuff basically out of the picture, we say, "Push this button and we'll take care of it." >> Now, Wim, but just quick sidebar here, last time we talked, it was under a year ago. It was definitely during COVID and it's still during COVID. We talked about the state of the penguin. So I'm wondering, you know, what's the latest update for Linux, any Linux developments that we should be aware of? >> Linux, we're still working very hard on Autonomous Linux and that's something where we can really differentiate and solve a problem. Of course, one of the things to mention is that Enterprise Manager can can do HIPAA compliance on Oracle Linux as well. So the security practices are not just for the database it can also go down to the operating system. Anyway, so on the Autonomous Linux side, you know, management in an Oracle Cloud's OS management is evolving. We're spending a lot of time on integrating log capturing, and if something were to go wrong that we can analyze a log file on the fly and send you a notification saying, "Hey, you know there was this bug and here's the cause." And it was potentially a fix for it to Autonomous Linux and we're putting a lot of effort into that. And then also sort of IT/operation management where we can look at the different applications that are running. So you're running a web server on a Linux environment or you're running some Java processes, we can see what's running. We can say, "Hey, here's the CPU utilization over the past week or the past year." And then how is this evolving? Say, if something suddenly spikes we can say, "Well, that's normal, because every Monday morning at 10 o'clock there's a spike or this is abnormal." And then you can start drilling this down. And this comes back to overtime integration with whether it's APM or Logging Analytics, we can tie the dots, right? We can connect them, we can say, "Push this thing, then click on that link." We give you the information. So it's that integration with the entire cloud platform that's really happening now >> Integration, there's that theme again. I want to come back to migration and I think you did a good job of explaining how you sort of make that non-disruptive and you know, your customers, I think, you know, generally you're pushing you know, that experience which makes people more comfortable. But my question is, why do people want to migrate if it works and it's on prem, are they doing it just because they want to get out of the data center business? Or is it a better experience in the cloud? What can you tell us there? >> You know, it's a little bit of everything. You know, one is, of course the idea that data center maintenance costs are very high. The other one is that when you run your own data center, you know, we obviously have this problem but when you're a cloud vendor, you have these problems but we're in this business. But if you buy a server, then in three years that server basically is depreciated by new versions and they have to do migration stuff. And so one of the advantages with cloud is you push a button, you have a new version of the hardware, basically, right? So the refreshes happen on a regular basis. You don't have to go and recycle that yourself. Then the other part is the subscription model. It's a lot easier to pay for what you use rather than you have a data center whether it's used or not, you pay for it. So there's the cost advantages and predictability of what you need, you pay for, you can say, "Oh next year we need to get x more of EMs." And it's easier to scale that, right? We take care of dealing with capacity planning. You don't have to deal with capacity planning of hardware, we do that as the cloud vendor. So there's all these practical advantages you get from doing it remotely and that's really what the appeal is. >> Right. So, as it relates to Enterprise Manager, did you guys have to like tear down the code and rebuild it? Was it entire like redo? How did you achieve that? >> No, no, no. So, Enterprise Manager keeps evolving and you know, we changed the underlying technologies here and there, piecemeal, not sort of a wholesale replacement. And so in talking about five, there's a lot of new stuff but it's built on the existing EM core. And so we're just, you know, improving certain areas. One of the things is, stability is important for our customers, obviously. And so by picking things piecemeal, we replace one engine rather than the whole thing. It allows us to introduce change more slowly, right. And then it's well-tested as a unit and then when we go on to the next thing. And then the other one is I mentioned earlier, a lot of the automation and extensibility comes from REST APIs. And so instead of basically re-writing everything we just provide a REST endpoint and we make all the new features that we built automatically be REST enabled. So that makes it a lot easier for us to introduce new stuff. >> Got it. So if I want to poke around with this new version of Enterprise Manager, can I do that? Is there a place I can go, do I have to call a rep? How does that work? >> Yeah, so for information you can just go to oracle.com/enterprise manager. That's the website that has all the data. The other thing is if you're already playing with Oracle Cloud or you use Oracle Cloud, we have Enterprise Manager images in the marketplace. So if you have never used EM, you can go to Oracle Cloud, push a button in the marketplace and you get a full Enterprise Manager installation in a matter of minutes. And then you can just start using that as well. >> Awesome. Hey, I wanted to ask you about, you know, people forget that you guys are the stewards of MySQL and we've been looking at MySQL Database Cloud service with HeatWave Did you name that? And so I wonder if you could talk about what you're doing with regard to managing HeatWave environments? >> So, HeatWave is the MySQL option that helps with analytics, right? And it really accelerates MySQL usage by 100 x and in some cases more and it's transparent to the customer. So as a MySQL user, you connect with standard MySQL applications and APIs and SQL and everything. And the HeatWave part is all done within the MySQL server. The engine itself says, "Oh, this SQL query, we can offload to the backend HeatWave cluster," which then goes in memory operations and blazingly fast returns it to you. And so the nice thing is that it turns every single MySQL database into also a data warehouse without any change whatsoever in your application. So it's been widely popular and it's quite exciting. I didn't personally name it, HeatWave, that was not my decision, but it sounds very cool. >> That's very cool. >> Yeah, It's a very cool name. >> We love MySQL, we started our company on the lamp stack, so like many >> Oh? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. That's great. So, yeah. And so with HeatWave or MySQL in general we're basically doing the same thing as we have done for the Oracle Database. So we're going to add more functionality in our database management tools to also look at HeatWave. So whether it's doing things like performance hub or generic database management and monitoring tools, we'll expand that in, you know, in the near future, in the future. >> That's great. Well, Wim, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back in "The Cube" and letting me ask all my Colombo questions. It was really a pleasure having you. (mumbling) >> It's good be here. Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. And thank you for watching, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios here in Palo Alto, California. We have a special Around theCUBE segment, Unpacking AI. This is a Get Smart Series. We have three great guests. Rajen Sheth, VP of AI and Product Management at Google. He knows well the AI development for Google Cloud. Dr. Kate Darling, research specialist at MIT media lab. And Professor Barry O'Sullivan, Director SFI Centre for Training AI, University of College Cork in Ireland. Thanks for coming on, everyone. Let's get right to it. Ethics in AI as AI becomes mainstream, moves out to the labs and computer science world to mainstream impact. The conversations are about ethics. And this is a huge conversation, but first thing people want to know is, what is AI? What is the definition of AI? How should people look at AI? What is the definition? We'll start there, Rajen. >> So I think the way I would define AI is any way that you can make a computer intelligent, to be able to do tasks that typically people used to do. And what's interesting is that AI is something, of course, that's been around for a very long time in many different forms. Everything from expert systems in the '90s, all the way through to neural networks now. And things like machine learning, for example. People often get confused between AI and machine learning. I would think of it almost the way you would think of physics and calculus. Machine learning is the current best way to use AI in the industry. >> Kate, your definition of AI, do you have one? >> Well, I find it interesting that there's no really good universal definition. And also, I would agree with Rajen that right now, we're using kind of a narrow definition when we talk about AI, but the proper definition is probably much more broad than that. So probably something like a computer system that can make decisions independent of human input. >> Professor Barry, your take on the definition of AI, is there one? What's a good definition? >> Well, you know, so I think AI has been around for 70 years, and we still haven't agreed the definition for it, as Kate said. I think that's one of those very interesting things. I suppose it's really about making machines act and behave rationally in the world, ideally autonomously, so without human intervention. But I suppose these days, AI is really focused on achieving human level performance in very narrowly defined tasks, you know, so game playing, recommender systems, planning. So we do those in isolation. We don't tend to put them together to create the fabled artificial general intelligence. I think that's something that we don't tend to focus on at all, actually if that made sense. >> Okay the question is that AI is kind of elusive, it's changing, it's evolving. It's been around for awhile, as you guys pointed out, but now that it's on everyone's mind, we see it in the news every day from Facebook being a technology program with billions of people. AI was supposed to solve the problem there. We see new workloads being developed with cloud computing where AI is a critical software component of all this. But that's a geeky world. But the real world, as an ethical conversation, is not a lot of computer scientists have taken ethics classes. So who decides what's ethical with AI? Professor Barry, let's start with you. Where do we start with ethics? >> Yeah, sure, so one of the things I do is I'm the Vice-Chair of the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, and this year we published the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in Europe, which is all about, you know, setting an ethical standard for what AI is. You're right, computer scientists don't take ethical standards, but I suppose what we are faced with here is a technology that's so pervasive in our lives that we really do need to think carefully about the impact of that technology on, you know, human agency, and human well-being, on societal well-being. So I think it's right and proper that we're talking about ethics at this moment in time. But, of course, we do need to realize that ethics is not a panacea, right? So it's certainly something we need to talk about, but it's not going to solve, it's not going to rid us of all of the detrimental applications or usages of AI that we might see today. >> Kate, your take on ethics. Start all over, throw out everything, build on it, what do we do? >> Well, what we do is we get more interdisciplinary, right? I mean, because you asked, "Who decides?". Until now it has been the people building the technology who have had to make some calls on ethics. And it's not, you know, it's not necessarily the way of thinking that they are trained in, and so it makes a lot of sense to have projects like the one that Barry is involved in, where you bring together people from different areas of expert... >> I think we lost Kate there. Rajen, why don't you jump in, talk about-- >> (muffled speaking) you decide issues of responsibility for harm. We have to look at algorithmic bias. We have to look at supplementing versus replacing human labor, we have to look at privacy and data security. We have look at the things that I'm interested in like the ways that people anthropomorphize the technology and use it in a way that's perhaps different than intended. So, depending on what issue we're looking at, we need to draw from a variety of disciplines. And fortunately we're seeing more support for this within companies and within universities as well. >> Rajen, your take on this. >> So, I think one thing that's interesting is to step back and understand why this moment is so compelling and why it's so important for us to understand this right now. And the reason for that is that this is the moment where AI is starting to have an impact on the everyday person. Anytime I present, I put up a slide of the Mosaic browser from 1994 and my point is that, that's where AI is today. It's at the very beginning stages of how we can impact people, even though it's been around for 70 years. And what's interesting about ethics, is we have an opportunity to do that right from the beginning right now. I think that there's a lot that you can bring in from the way that we think about ethics overall. For example, in our company, can you all hear me? >> Yep. >> Mm-hmm. >> Okay, we've hired an ethicist within our company, from a university, to actually bring in the general principles of ethics and bring that into AI. But I also do think that things are different so for example, bias is an ethical problem. However, bias can be encoded and actually given more legitimacy when it could be encoded in an algorithm. So, those are things that we really need to watch out for where I think it is a little bit different and a little bit more interesting. >> This is a great point-- >> Let me just-- >> Oh, go ahead. >> Yeah, just one interesting thing to bear in mind, and I think Kate said this, and I just want to echo it, is that AI is becoming extremely multidisciplinary. And I think it's no longer a technical issue. Obviously there are massive technical challenges, but it's now become as much an opportunity for people in the social sciences, the humanities, ethics people. Legal people, I think need to understand AI. And in fact, I gave a talk recently at a legal symposium, and the idea of this on a parallel track of people who have legal expertise and AI expertise, I think that's a really fantastic opportunity that we need to bear in mind. So, unfortunately us nerds, we don't own AI anymore. You know, it's something we need to interact with the real world on a significant basis. >> You know, I want to ask a question, because you know, the algorithms, everyone talks about the algorithms and the bias and all that stuff. It's totally relevant, great points on interdisciplinary, but there's a human component here. As AI starts to infiltrate the culture and hit everyday life, the reaction to AI sometimes can be, "Whoa, my job's going to get automated away." So, I got to ask you guys, as we deal with AI, is that a reflection on how we deal with it to our own humanity? Because how we deal with AI from an ethics standpoint ultimately is a reflection on our own humanity. Your thoughts on this. Rajen, we'll start with you. >> I mean it is, oh, sorry, Rajen? >> So, I think it is. And I think that there are three big issues that I see that I think are reflective of ethics in general, but then also really are particular to AI. So, there's bias. And bias is an overall ethical issue that I think this is particular here. There's what you mentioned, future of work, you know, what does the workforce look like 10 years from now. And that changes quite a bit over time. If you look at the workforce now versus 30 years ago, it's quite a bit different. And AI will change that radically over the next 10 years. The other thing is what is good use of AI, and what's bad use of AI? And I think one thing we've discovered is that there's probably 10% of things that are clearly bad, and 10% of things that are clearly good, and 80% of things that are in that gray area in between where it's up to kind of your personal view. And that's the really really tough part about all this. >> Kate, you were going to weigh in. >> Well, I think that, I'm actually going to push back a little, not on Rajen, but on the question. Because I think that one of the fallacies that we are constantly engaging in is we are comparing artificial intelligence to human intelligence, and robots to people, and we're failing to acknowledge sufficiently that AI has a very different skillset than a person. So, I think it makes more sense to look at different analogies. For example, how have we used and integrated animals in the past to help us with work? And that lets us see that the answer to questions like, "Will AI disrupt the labor market?" "Will it change infrastructures and efficiencies?" The answer to that is yes. But will it be a one-to-one replacement of people? No. That said, I do think that AI is a really interesting mirror that we're holding up to ourselves to answer certain questions like, "What is our definition of fairness?" for example. We want algorithms to be fair. We want to program ethics into machines. And what it's really showing us is that we don't have good definitions of what these things are even though we thought we did. >> All right, Professor Barry, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think there's many points one could make here. I suppose the first thing is that we should be seeing AI, not as a replacement technology, but as an assistive technology. It's here to help us in all sorts of ways to make us more productive, and to make us more accurate in how we carry out certain tasks. I think, absolutely the labor force will be transformed in the future, but there isn't going to be massive job loss. You know, the technology has always changed how we work and play and interact with each other. You know, look at the smart phone. The smart phone is 12 years old. We never imagined in 2007 that our world would be the way it is today. So technology transforms very subtly over long periods of time, and that's how it should be. I think we shouldn't fear AI. I think the thing we should fear most, in fact, is not Artificial Intelligence, but is actual stupidity. So I think we need to, I would encourage people not to think, it's very easy to talk negatively and think negatively about AI because it is such a impactful and promising technology, but I think we need to keep it real a little bit, right? So there's a lot of hype around AI that we need to sort of see through and understand what's real and what's not. And that's really some of the challenges we have to face. And also, one of the big challenges we have, is how do we educate the ordinary person on the street to understand what AI is, what it's capable of, when it can be trusted, and when it cannot be trusted. And ethics gets of some of the way there, but it doesn't have to get us all of the way there. We need good old-fashioned good engineering to make people trust in the system. >> That was a great point. Ethics is kind of a reflection of that mirror, I love that. Kate, I want to get to that animal comment about domesticating technology, but I want to stay in this culture question for a minute. If you look at some of the major tech companies like Microsoft and others, the employees are revolting around their use of AI in certain use cases. It's a knee-jerk reaction around, "Oh my God, "We're using AI, we're harming the world." So, we live in a culture now where it's becoming more mission driven. There's a cultural impact, and to your point about not fearing AI, are people having a certain knee-jerk reaction to AI because you're seeing cultures inside tech companies and society taking an opinion on AI. "Oh my God, it's definitely bad, our company's doing it. "We should not service those contracts. "Or, maybe I shouldn't buy that product "because it's listening to me." So, there's a general fear. Does this impact the ethical conversation? How do you guys see this? Because this is an interplay that we see that's a personal, it's a human reaction. >> Yeah, so if I may start, I suppose, absolutely there are, you know, the ethics debates is a critical one, and people are certainly fearful. There is this polarization in debate about good AI and bad AI, but you know, AI is good technology. It's one of these dual-use technologies. It can be applied to bad situation in ways that we would prefer it wasn't. And it can also, it's a force for tremendous good. So, we need to think about the regulation of AI, what we want it to do from a legal point of view, who is responsible, where does liability lie? We also think about what our ethical framework is, and of course, there is no international agreement on what is, there is no universal code of ethics, you know? So this is something that's very very heavily contextualized. But I think we certainly, I think we generally agree that we want to promote human well-being. We want to compute, we want to have a prosperous society. We want to protect the well-being of society. We don't want technology to impact society in any negative way. It's actually very funny. If you look back about 25-30 years ago, there was a technology where people were concerned that privacy was going to be a thing of the past. That computer systems were going to be tremendously biased because data was going to be incomplete and not representative. And there was a huge concern that good old-fashioned databases were going to be the technology that will destroy the fabric of society. That didn't happen. And I don't think we're going to have AI do that either. >> Kate? >> Yeah, we've seen a lot of technology panic, that may or may not be warranted, in the past. I think that AI and robotics suffers from a specific problem that people are influenced by science fiction and pop culture when they're thinking about the technology. And I feel like that can cause people to be worried about some things that maybe perhaps aren't the thing we should be worrying about currently. Like robots and jobs, or artificial super-intelligence taking over and killing us all, aren't maybe the main concerns we should have right now. But, algorithmic bias, for example, is a real thing, right? We see systems using data sets that disadvantage women, or people of color, and yet the use of AI is seen as neutral even though it's impinging existing biases. Or privacy and data security, right? You have technologies that are collecting massive amounts of data because the way learning works is you use lots of data. And so there's a lot of incentive to collect data. As a consumer, there's not a lot of incentive for me to want to curb that, because I want the device to listen to me and to be able to perform better. And so the question is, who is thinking about consumer protection in this space if all the incentives are toward collecting and using as much data as possible. And so I do think there is a certain amount of concern that is warranted, and where there are problems, I endorse people revolting, right? But I do think that we are sometimes a little bit skewed in our, you know, understanding where we currently are at with the technology, and what the actual problems are right now. >> Rajen, I want your thoughts on this. Education is key. As you guys were talking about, there's some things to pay attention to. How do you educate people about how to shape AI for good, and at the same time calm the fears of people at the same time, from revolting around misinformation or bad data around what could be? >> Well I think that the key thing here is to organize kind of how you evaluate this. And back to that one thing I was saying a little bit earlier, it's very tough to judge kind of what is good and what is bad. It's really up to personal perception. But then the more that you organize how to evaluate this, and then figure out ways to govern this, the easier it gets to evaluate what's in or out . So one thing that we did, was that we created a set of AI principles, and we kind of codified what we think AI should do, and then we codified areas that we would not go into as a company. The thing is, it's very high level. It's kind of like the constitution, and when you have something like the constitution, you have to get down to actual laws of what you would and wouldn't do. It's very hard to bucket and say, these are good use cases, these are bad use cases. But what we now have is a process around how do we actually take things that are coming in and figure out how do we evaluate them? A last thing that I'll mention, is that I think it's very important to have many many different viewpoints on it. Have viewpoints of people that are taking it from a business perspective, have people that are taking it from kind of a research and an ethics perspective, and all evaluate that together. And that's really what we've tried to create to be able to evaluate things as they come up. >> Well, I love that constitution angle. We'll have that as our last final question in a minute, that do we do a reset or not, but I want to get to that point that Kate mentioned. Kate, you're doing research around robotics. And I think robotics is, you've seen robotics surge in popularity from high schools have varsity teams now. You're seeing robotics with software advances and technology advances really become kind of a playful illustration of computer technology and software where AI is playing a role, and you're doing a lot of work there. But as intelligence comes into, say robotics, or software, or AI, there's a human reaction to all of this. So there's a psychology interaction to either AI and robotics. Can you guys share your thoughts on the humanization interaction between technology, as people stare at their phones today, that could be relationships in the future. And I think robotics might be a signal. You mentioned domesticating animals as an example back in the early days of when we were (laughing) as a society, that happened. Now we all have pets. Are we going to have robots as pets? Are we going to have AI pets? >> Yes, we are. (laughing) >> Is this kind of the human relationship? Okay, go ahead, share your thoughts. >> So, okay, the thing that I love about robots, and you know, in some applications to AI as well, is that people will treat these technologies like they're alive. Even though they know that they're just machine. And part of that is, again, the influence of science fiction and pop culture, that kind of primes us to do this. Part of it is the novelty of the technology moving into shared spaces, but then there's this actual biological element to it, where we have this inherent tendency to anthropomorphize, project human-like traits, behaviors, qualities, onto non-humans. And robots lend themselves really well to that because our brains are constantly scanning our environments and trying to separate things into objects and agents. And robots move like agents. We are evolutionarily hardwired to project intent onto the autonomous movement in our physical space. And this is why I love robots in particular as an AI use case, because people end up treating robots totally differently. Like people will name their Roomba vacuum cleaner and feel bad for it when it gets stuck, which they would never do with their normal vacuum cleaner, right? So, this anthropomorphization, I think, makes a huge difference when you're trying to integrate the technology, because it can have negative effects. It can lead to inefficiencies or even dangerous situations. For example, if you're using robots in the military as tools, and they're treating them like pets instead of devices. But then there are also some really fantastic use cases in health and education that rely specifically on this socialization of the robot. You can use a robot as a replacement for animal therapy where you can't use real animals. We're seeing great results in therapy with autistic children, engaging them in ways that we haven't seen previously. So there are a lot of really cool ways that we can make this work for us as well. >> Barry, your thoughts, have you ever thought that we'd be adopting AI as pets some day? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Like Kate, I'm very excited about all of this too, and I think there's a few, I agree with everything Kate has said. Of course, you know, coming back to the remark you made at the beginning about people putting their faces in their smartphones all the time, you know, we can't crowdsource our sense of dignity, or that we can't have social media as the currency for how we value our lives or how we compare ourselves with others. So, you know, we do have to be careful here. Like, one of the really nice things about, one of the really nice examples of an AI system that was given some significant personality was, quite recently, Tuomas Sandholm and others at Carnegie Mellon produced this Liberatus poker playing bot, and this AI system was playing against these top-class Texas hold' em players. And all of these Texas hold 'em players were attributing a level of cunning and sophistication and mischief on this AI system that clearly it didn't have because it was essentially trying to just behave rationally. But we do like to project human characteristics onto AI systems. And I think what would be very very nice, and something we need to be very very careful of, is that when AI systems are around us, and particularly robots, you know, we do need to treat them with respect. And what I mean is, we do make sure that we treat those things that are serving society in as positive and nice a way as possible. You know, I do judge people on how they interact with, you know, sort of the least advantaged people in society. And you know, by golly, I will judge you on how you interact with a robot. >> Rajen-- >> We've actually done some research on that, where-- >> Oh, really-- >> We've shown that if you're low empathy, you're more willing to hit a robot, especially if it has a name. (panel laughing) >> I love all my equipment here, >> Oh, yeah? >> I got to tell ya, it's all beautiful. Rajen, computer science, and now AIs having this kind of humanization impact, this is an interesting shift. I mean, this is not what we studied in computer science. We were writin' code. We were going to automate things. Now there's notions of math, and not just math cognition, human relations, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, you know what's interesting is that I think ultimately it boils down to the user experience. And I think there is this part of this which is around humanization, but then ultimately it boils down to what are you trying to do? And how well are you doing it with this technology? And I think that example around the Roomba is very interesting, where I think people kind of feel like this is more, almost like a person. But, also I think we should focus as well on what the technology is doing, and what impact it's having. My best example of this is Google Photos. And so, my whole family uses Google Photos, and they don't know that underlying it is some of the most powerful AI in the world. All they know is that they can find pictures of our kids and their grandkids on the beach anytime that they want. And so ultimately, I think it boils down to what is the AI doing for the people? And how is it? >> Yeah, expectations become the new user experience. I love that. Okay, guys, final question, and also humanization, we talked about the robotics, but also the ethics here. Ethics reminds me of the old security debate, and security in the old days. Do you increase the security, or do you throw it all away and start over? So with this idea of how do you figure out ethics in today's modern society with it being a mirror? Do we throw it all away and do a do-over, can we recast this? Can we start over? Do we augment? What's the approach that you guys see that we might need to go through right now to really, not hold back AI, but let it continue to grow and accelerate, educate people, bring value and user experience to the table? What is the path? We'll start with Barry, and then Kate, and then Rajen. >> Yeah, I can kick off. I think ethics gets us some of the way there, right? So, obviously we need to have a set of principles that we sign up to and agree upon. And there are literally hundreds of documents on AI ethics. I think in Europe, for example, there are 128 different documents around AI ethics, I mean policy documents. But, you know, we have to think about how are we actually going to make this happen in the real world? And I think, you know, if you take the aviation industry, that we trust in airplanes, because we understand that they're built to the highest standards, that they're tested rigorously, and that the organizations that are building these things are held account when things go wrong. And I think we need to do something similar in AI. We need good strong engineering, and you know, ethics is fantastic, and I'm a strong believer in ethical codes, but we do need to make it practical. And we do need to figure out a way of having the public trust in AI systems, and that comes back to education. So, I think we need the general public, and indeed ourselves, to be a little more cynical and questioning when we hear stories in the media about AI, because a lot of it is hyped. You know, and that's because researchers want to describe their research in an exciting way, but also, newspaper people and media people want to have a sticky subject. But I think we do need to have a society that can look at these technologies and really critique them and understand what's been said. And I think a healthy dose of cynicism is not going to do us any harm. >> So, modernization, do you change the ethical definition? Kate, what's your thoughts on all this? >> Well, I love that Barry brought up the aviation industry because I think that right now we're kind of an industry in its infancy, but if we look at how other industries have evolved to deal with some thorny ethical issues, like for example, medicine. You know, medicine had to develop a whole code of ethics, and develop a bunch of standards. If you look at aviation or other transportation industries, they've had to deal with a lot of things like public perception of what the technology can and can't do, and so you look at the growing pains that those industries have gone through, and then you add in some modern insight about interdisciplinary, about diversity, and tech development generally. Getting people together who have different experiences, different life experiences, when you're developing the technology, and I think we don't have to rebuild the wheel here. >> Yep. >> Rajen, your thoughts on the path forward, throw it all away, rebuild, what do we do? >> Yeah, so I think this is a really interesting one because of all the technologies I've worked in within my career, everything from the internet, to mobile, to virtualization, this is probably the most powerful potential for human good out there. And AI, the potential of what it can do is greater than almost anything else that's out there. However, I do think that people's perception of what it's going to do is a little bit skewed. So when people think of AI, they think of self-driving cars and robots and things like that. And that's not the reality of what AI is today. And so I think two things are important. One is to actually look at the reality of what AI is doing today and where it impacts people lives. Like, how does it personalize customer interactions? How does it make things more efficient? How do we spot things that we never were able to spot before? And start there, and then apply the ethics that we've already known for years and years and years, but adapt it to a way that actually makes sense for this. >> Okay, like that's it for the Around theCUBE. Looks like we've tallied up. Looks like Professor Barry 11, third place, Kate in second place with 13. Rajen with 16 points, you're the winner, so you get the last word on the segment here. Share your final thoughts on this panel. >> Well, I think it's really important that we're having this conversation right now. I think about back to 1994 when the internet first started. People did not have that conversation nearly as much at that point, and the internet has done some amazing things, and there have been some bad side effects. I think with this, if we have this conversation now, we have this opportunity to shape this technology in a very very positive way as we go forward. >> Thank you so much, and thanks everyone for taking the time to come in. All the way form Cork, Ireland, Professor Barry O'Sullivan. Dr. Kate Darling doing some amazing research at MIT on robotics and human psychology and like a new book coming out. Kate, thanks for coming out. And Rajen, thanks for winning and sharing your thoughts. Thanks everyone for coming. This is Around theCUBE here, Unpacking AI segment around ethics and human interaction and societal impact. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to the special cube conversation with a remote guest Steve Herod managing director of general kennel s he's a venture capitalist former CTO of VMware cube alumni Steve welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto you're right across town but still we're gonna grab you big news happening and also get your thoughts on the Emerald 2019 welcome to our remote conversation yeah hey Jon yeah we're close and yet this makes it even more convenient go we'd love the new format of bring people into no matter where they are no matter what whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that and and two important ones to having we we know vm world's coming next week but congratulations in order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX another cube alumni firm we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition by Splunk today for over a billion dollars sixty percent in cash and forty percent in stop congratulations you've been on the board you've known these guys from VMware quite a team quite an exit it's a win-win for those guys congratulations yeah great group of guys several of which were at VMware has you as you mentioned and as you've had on your show that's great they were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it and they're marrying it with spunks ability to ingest logs and really understand operational data and I think the combination will be very powerful it brings kind of what we've been monitoring cloud 2.0 essentially monitoring 2.0 is really observability as the world starts moving into the the kinds of services we're seeing with cloud and on-premises operations more than ever that game has changes much more dynamic and the security impact is significant and certainly as applications connect whether it's IOT or any IP device having that data at scale is really a critical part of that and I know signal FX was one of those companies where you invested early and I remember interview them a couple years ago and saying damn these guys might be too early I mean they're so smart they're so on it but this is an example of skating to where the as Wayne Gretzky would say these guys were just hitting their stride Steve can you can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important well they've been at this for a long time and they're a great team I've been involved as an investor less time obviously but yeah it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world and you know as you discovered we're in a world of micro services and containers and that is definitely hitting its stride right now and so they were in the right place knowing how to monitor this very fast moving information and and make some sense out of it so yeah really good job on their part and it was a pleasure to be along for part of the ride with them it's great to meet great founders that have a vision and stay the course because you know it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around ok we're talking micro services and containers way back before it became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises it's easy to get distracted and it's fashion well just jump on this trend or this wave they stayed the course they stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observability which to me is code word for monitoring 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw companies going public companies filing the pager Duty dynaTrace now the you guys with your acquisition with signal FX this is an important sector this would normally be viewed in the IT world as kind of lists of white space but it seems to be a much bigger landscape can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important why is observability so hot Steve well it's been this actually been a great market to be in for quite a while they've been a large number of companies continuing to be both built up and it's pretty simple the amount of e-commerce or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the web has gone up and so anything is not performing well or house downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company and so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on more for revenue and for customer interactions you know simply you have to have better tools and that's gonna be something that continues to evolve we have more complex apps and more commerce is going to go through them complexity is obviously something that people a lot of people are talking about I want to ask you something around today's marketplace but I want you to compare and contrast it similarly to what your experience was at VMware when you the CTO you know virtualization evolved very very quickly and ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure and a lot of people were pooh-poohing that initially at first and then all the sudden became we got to kill VMware and you know so the resiliency of VMware was such that they continued to innovate on virtualization and so that's been you know part of the legacy of VMware and VM roads will cover next next week but when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud opportunities with micro services and other other cool things the the role of the application is being is important part of the equation it used to be the stand up infrastructure and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of changed that game now you don't need to stand up any infrastructure you can just deploy an application then the infrastructure can be code and be self formed so you can have unique requirements as infrastructure driven by the application the whole world seems to have flipped around do you see it that way is that accurate assessment and what's your thoughts on that I think you're right on a bunch of fronts people have been calling it different things but the beauty of VMware and you know this is a while ago now but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use it sort of slid in underneath and added value but at the same time applications evolved and so the path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications you have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new services that are in the cloud and as you build up these as they're called cloud native applications it really is about the infrastructure you know it's job and life as to run applications and it's it sort of felt like the other way around it needs to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was it shouldn't be like that anymore it's about what what you need to do to get the job done and so we see the evolution of the clouds and their services that are there certainly the notion of containers and a lot the stuff that VMware is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure VMware adds value to them whatever type of application they are it's interesting one of the exciting things in this wave that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud and public cloud now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0 you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud even early on around 2012-2013 we were talking about that at VMworld you know certainly Pat Kelson here but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated you got outpost you got Azure stack among other things the reality is if you are cloud native you might not need to have anything on premise like companies like ours with 50 plus people we don't have an IT department but most enterprises have stuff on premise so the the nuance these days is around you know what's the architecture of IT these days when you add security into it's complicated so there's debates can there be a sole cloud for a workload certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jedi contract where it's not necessarily a sole cloud for the entire department of defense it's a sole cloud for the workload the military application workload or app the military it's 10 billion dollar application and it's okay to have one cloud as we would say but yet they're gonna use Microsoft's cloud for other things so the DoD's having a multiple cloud approach multiple environments multiple vendors if you will but you don't have to split the cloud up or say this is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way which was have a multi-vendor environment split two things what's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud is it okay to have a workload have a single clap for that workload and coexist with other clouds it's funny I've been thinking about this more lately where if you went back earlier in time forgetting cloud there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you could run on whether it be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or UNIX system or a Linux system and to some extent people are choosing what would run where based on the demands of the application sometimes on price sometimes on certifications or even what's been ported to the right one so this is I'm beating myself but you know that's that's a while ago it's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud services are out there whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics and it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run and so forgetting VMware exactly but think of a virtualization layer that that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds I do think that's where a lot of the you know the core software is head of these days to really enable that to work better and so a million other use cases with with you know storage being moved around for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might be but that core of flexibility reminds me a lot of you know choosing what application would one run would run where within your own company and the kubernetes trend in container certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VMware's on the ends beams under the covers or put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities so it's exciting and you slap an API in front of them and and micro-services sort of works in tandem with that so that you you could really have your application composed across multiple environments and I think the observable observability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way which is monitoring making sure things are operating effectively and combining with data and so when I heard about the acquisition of signal FX into Splunk I'm like there it is we're back to data so observability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring but it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts so there's more data than ever for sure and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost all that is a big part of our you know the environments we all work and the key thing is turning that into some actionable insight and whether you're using you know interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in do I avoid false false positives how do i only alert people when needed and then that allows you to do what everyone has talked about for 30 years which is automatic remediation but for now let's talk about it is how do i process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action see we want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation you've been with us at the cube since 2010 I think our first cube event was EMC world 2010 that show doesn't exist any longer because that folded into Dell technologies world so VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the cube cubes been around of course you guys had the VM worlds had their 10th anniversary I think was 2013 as a show but this is our 10th year I want to thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral appreciate all that so I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you've been with the cube VMworld what's the most exciting moments what are moments that you can say hey that was an amazing time that was a grind but we got through it funny moments your thoughts yeah boy that's a tough question I've enjoyed you know working with you John and the cube there have been so many really interesting things for me the some of the big acquisitions that we went through at VMware where I think the nsx acquisition when we get nasarah I think that really pushed us in an interesting spot but we had gone through IPOs and acquisition ourselves by EMC and we've gone through some pretty vicious competition from whether it be Citrix or Zin or Microsoft yeah that's just the joy of being at these companies it's lots of ups and downs along the way but they all kind of fit together to make an exciting life what were some moments for you I know you had left was a twenty fifteen or twenty six point eight vs world you go down there yeah about six years what do you miss about VMware the team is what everyone kind of cliche says but it's totally true the chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Co ideas so I definitely missed that miss shipping products you don't get to do that as much as a venture capitalist but but on the flip side this is a great world to be and I get to see enthusiastic you know very optimistic founders all day long pushing the envelope and while that was existing at the EM where it's it's what I see every single day here you've been on the cube ten times at vmworld that's the all time spot you're tied but first congratulations on the leaderboard well it's been a great ten years going forward we've seen more so go looking back I would say that you know Palmer it's taking over from Diane Greene really set the table he actually laid out essentially what I think now as a clearly a cloud SAS architecture I think he got that pretty much right again or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time though some things that didn't materialize as fast but ultimately from a core perspective you guys got that right and then went in try to do the cloud but then and this year it comes in for a software-defined you know line with Amazon and since that time the stock has been really kind of up to the right so you know some key moments there for VMware from small somalia more stuff it's fun to see pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there but I think you know there's there's a hugely talented team of executives there Pat Yeltsin jurors come in and done a great job I think Raghu and all these folks that are in there are good thinkers and so I think you'll consider to continue to see it evolve quite a bit and probably some cool announcements next week talk about the role Raghu and the team played because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight he avoids it I know he'd I've talked to him privately he won't come on the qoi let the other guys go on other guys and gals so he's been instrumental he was really critical in multiple deals could you share some insight into his role at VMware VMware and why it's been so important well I'll push them to get on especially now that you have remote you can probably grab him no he and Rajiv and andraia Ferrell just all the guys are I think he and regime basically split up half and half of the products but I know Raghu is very very similar in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working well he's good friend in a very smart guy well I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna give him in a headlock and tell him to come on the cube this year we want him on he's a great great great guest he's certainly knowledgeable going forward Steve 10 years out we still got 10 more years of great change coming if you look at the wave that's coming you're out investing in companies again you had one big exit today with the billion dollar acquisition that was happening by Splunk and signal affects a lot more action you've been investing in security what's your outlook as you look at the next ten years there's a lot more action to happen we seem to be early days in this new modern era historic time in the computer industry has applications of now dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do what are you excited about there's there's a million things I get to see everyday which are clearly where the world is headed but I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure which the job and life of infrastructure is to run applications and so then you look at applications how are they changing and and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them and if you look at the future of applications it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter it's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking you can do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the backend so I kind of look at all these application patterns and really try to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's going to be needed to run them I think we have plenty of headroom of interesting ideas ahead stew Dave and I were talks to Dave Stuben they want this too many man died we're talking about you know as infrastructure and cloud get automated as automation comes in new waves are gonna be formed from it what new waves do you see is it's like RPAs a I I mean because as those things get sucked in and they ships in to new waves what are the some of the key ways people should pay attention to I'm not saying the inverse tress is going away but as it becomes automated and as the shift happens the value still is there where is those new waves well I think today it looks like most applications are going to be composed of a lot of services and I think they're gonna be able they're gonna need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as headless api friends and so again I think at the end of the day this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability have to crunch through tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and ability in the network and all those are very hard problems that we've been working on for a while I think we're gonna keep working on them and new forms for the next ten years at least awesome see thanks for being a friend with us in the cube what's your funny favorite moment of the Q can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way you've come a long way actually I've enjoyed it I mean it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the cube like that was that was really cool but now the fact that I'm on my laptop you know doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome so I think you're following the same patterns of the other of the other applications moving to the cloud and having good user experience because cube native here software if the male native Steve thank you so much for staying the time commenting on the acquisition I know it's fresh on the press a lot more analysis and cut to come next week it's certainly I'll be co-hosting ATS plunks Kampf later in the year so I'm looking forward to connecting with the team there and again thanks for all your contribution into the cube community we really appreciate it one thank you for your time thanks John you guys are awesome thanks for chatting okay Steve Herod managing director at General Counsel top tier VC from here in Silicon Valley and they have offices around the world I'm Jean ferré breaking down the news as well as a VM real preview with the former CTO of VMware Steve hare now a big-time venture capitalist I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the EM Where women transforming technology twenty nineteen. Brought to you by V. M. Where. >> Lisa Martin on the ground at the end. Where in Palo Alto, California for the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology event. W. Squared one of my favorite events, and I'm pleased to welcome back to the Cube, one of the leader female leaders at being where Lily Chang, the VP of of the strategic transformation office. Lily, it's so great to have you on the program again. >> Thank you. It's my pleasure and honor to be here. >> So this event, one of my favorites, as I mentioned, even just walking up to registration this morning. The energy, the excitement, the supports >> is in the air. >> Yes, And then you walk into the keynote, and it was kicked off this morning with such an incredible presentation, and number was actually mentioned earlier. That was about fifteen hundred people just in person today, not even mentioning the live stream. So the momentum in just four years that you guys are creating is huge. >> Yes, Well, where is a great place for diversity and inclusion that is one of our companies. Strategic Motif Way believed that in order to basically create the best technology in the world, today was the evolution and the advancement >> off. All these technology working together, we're servicing all genders origin globally. So that means the creation of this. We >> need to bring all these culture aspect to bring into our design thinking. So when we saw the problem, we are not solving in in a mo no fashion way actually can look at multiple facets. So having this event is part of our passion is really part of our DNA. Now >> I think that's fantastic. That's inspirational for other companies to really look it. It's not just an event that Veum were put on. This is really changing the anywhere from within as well. >> Yes, this a change process has started quite a while ago. I would say inherently Arjun Attic nature off of'em were is that we actually >> do believe in all genders are original founder and CEO was a woman, right? And so we pioneered a virtual ization and we believe in woman leadership. We believe in all levels off woman innovation, together with man and all the origin globally in the >> world That's fantastic. So I wanted last year we talked with you, which was fantastic. We're happy to have you back. I want to talk about something that you guys recently launching aboutthe last year helping women return to work. Tell us about Tara and just >> helping women how they are able to get back into technology. >> Yes, so this is one of my favorite topic. Basically, we talked about glasses, ceilings for decades, about woman in terms of how you break two classes ceiling, how you identified, how you work around it and all the things. There is a huge transparent glasses ceiling being view worldwide for a long time, and that is basically woman care about the society. Women care about the family, so, so, so so all the genders as well. However, there's a lot of the woman were forced. They may be technically very achieving in terms with their career or academic side. They have to basically take care ofthe parenthood, take care of family for various personal reasons. After a couple of years, their passion for the technology still exist. They want to join the war force to propel the world, and basically especially now, was the technology is put to a lot of technology for good, to help sustainability, to help medical field, to help disabled people. All these >> things right, but they're having a little bit of >> difficulty to read. Enter the work face and that's a glass is silly because their technology knowledge may be a little bit dated because just away how in the past ten years how you were in all >> the other Giants has propelled technology so quickly changes so quickly like three months >> is almost like a decade nowadays, right is moving in that quantum speed. So what >> we have done is basically we decided to create a Tara project. Is a woman returned to work initiative and we're basically >> launching specifically, focus on India region, right? And basically we are funding fifteen thousand woman, and we are training them and brought him up to speed about technology. Especially, was our software different data center in virtual ization? Networking storage? Right. So we are giving them a certification program, and that is something in some part of the world. That certificate moves a lot. It's like a pedigree indicate that you not only believe you actually know all this you've got evidence that you really know it and they're people. I certify you so with that, that enable them to be able to jump back into the workforce was full qualification and was a virtual ization being dominant in the world, right? Basically, it's like something that it's really hot and really relevant and were also helping them to basically connect with our customers in India so that they actually could be interview for future positions as well. How so, basically, is a into end strategy transformation to break the huge glasses ceiling >> here. Thick glass ceilings. So you fifteen thousand women this >> has just >> launched last year. How long is the certification program that they >> go through? We want to be able to achieve that. Go in the next couple years, starting this year >> starting this year, fifteen thousand women in the next couple of years. >> In the next couple years >> way, I should have >> got a few thousands already. So in the beginning for the first quarter, two were making very decent progress and Wei have a community partner. Happens to be a woman who co because they have a worldwide organization and they're sending the community message out to promote this. We also working really closely with the Indian government to push for this, to get their recognition for this as well, because we believe that will be beneficial for these woman we brought back to the war force. There's multiple aspect is not just touching the hearts in the soul ofthe many, many family, but is also basically injecting quality, highly qualified, incompetent technical talent back into the India community and industry, so that actually can proliferate and elevate the entire India technology level. >> Two shaves >> Transformative. I feel like that word isn't even strong enough, Lulu. That's remarkable. The potential that has on you mentioned the involvement of women who could have been on the board there for quite a while >> for more than three years now. >> And I was looking at >> some numbers with growth of that community alone is incredible. Over one hundred eighty thousand members in twenty countries So far you've done over eight thousand training's workshops. Hackathons conferences over two point five million dollars has been awarded in developer school in conference scholarships. >> Wow, the momentum moment is very high. It is very hard, you >> said you're even launching another country this year. >> We So we're not sitting on saying OK, we're satisfied. We're never satisfied because the world goes on right? So does the word expand. Thus the technology excel itself. We want to basically leap ahead with all this. So we're not stopping. So this year will Mexico and being where we're launching Costa Rica za So we believe we actually opened a lot of the region of the world and unlock the energy and the innovation and the community's oh gender to work together in India, China, Sofia. And we worked really closely with a lot of the industry technical giants and woman Wilco propelling this tech woman community in us and also in Europe. Now we will leave Costa Rica. It's a very strategic side for bm where >> tell us a >> little bit more about why is it sister team is a >> strategic for a couple reasons we are doing also world we are working together was a global community and the global clock. So Costa Rica is tine zone wise very nicely either bridge in between the other time zone with us and also it's overlapping very well with us times. Oh, so they actually could do a lot of the key business execution, including operation and IT and customer support. Technical support. So we do have technical people over there, but not enough technical woman Momenta way also believe the country can really use some help from us. So we're working with a woman who co and this is a decision will be assessing for awhile. But we believe that ranch in Costa Rico Ashley make it a blossom in that region off the world, not just Costarica. We're kind of looking that we hope it becomes a hub >> That's incredible, just but also not just what you're doing with Tara and with expanding women who code to Costa Rica. It's also the opportunity for actual economic benefits to these countries. But what I also I'm hearing is that, for example, with Tara, you're No, it's not just it's a the end where myopic. We want more women to come back to the workforce the way we want them too injured to be introduced to our customer base so that they can network, >> and it tends to establish report >> other opportunities for employment. >> That's right, even though they do not get a particular position when they are connected to a customer that is a relationship, and that is something that will stay with that woman in that talent for walk. And that is something that we feel is very important to connect all these critical stakeholders together. So Tara has that faucet ahs well, >> and you mentioned that there's already been about a thousand or a couple of thousand >> of thousands already gone morning. >> Twenty five hundred, I believe, >> any favorite success stories that come to mind. >> Yes, my favorites is says Story is >> the very first Tara Certify Woman is a woman who co member, so we're very, very proud of that because that shows the partnership actually works. That means a lot of the technical curriculum and a monthly meet up and all these technical conference. That woman who was trying to do the scholarship they try to handle all those are kind of a cumulatively paying off. Was Tara being the major critical push to push them over that glass ceiling limit? Right? >> I just think that's fantastic. I was looking at the woman who could website just the other day, and I saw that your event it was sold out >> you connect >> twenty nineteen? >> That's right. >> But just the moment on the excitement, the support in this community that is growing, as we mentioned earlier, one hundred eighty thousand plus tell us about the connect event >> Connected is a technical conference. We do talk a little bit about. The leadership in this office is skilled, but it has motive. All technology track. In fact, this year what we want to do is we want to start basically elevating into technology domain track because we now have a very successful who created leadership role like a city director. City Italy. They incubated from Weston ten thousand member in the past three and a half years. Two hundred eighty thousand member. A lot of the kudos and credit go to them, but as a result, we have wealth, body off woman talent that are highly technical and highly versatile in many, many fields. Right, because we believe today, for a poor talent to be successful in technology field, you cannot just specialize in one. If you look at Coyote, you look at a blockchain, all these emerging stuff. It's not just about a Iot machine. Learning is also about virtual ization about how well you can do the logic and the analytics and the data mining and the algorithms. Right? So basically we want to have multiple technology track, and that would include things like cloud like Blough Chan. And then that gives also a possibility for one who quote to create a individual contributor volunteer track, like we want to basically launched a notion off a cloud architect, right? So give basically people away to aspire to growth and so they can actually measure the growth, which is very good in the sense off that you know where you stand, you know, you can't plan for the next step. And so this isn't something that we want to be able to do, and we're basically launching that as well. Um connect also via were hosted open the Global Connect in India. This year we had a breakthrough. We actually have more than a thousand attendees. Wow, so that's like more than twice to jump from last year. Last year was about maybe three hundred. Niche, right? So this is a tremendous growth, and basically it's wonderful to see that there's a lot of technology track and the woman coming in sharing very openly about what they know and the sharing and the learning. And the coaching is part of the whole overall energy as well. >> So if we look at impact so far, the various impact that you talked about with both Tara, which is quite really in its history women who code w. T squared and we look at, say, even in the US alone, fifty percent of the population is female. It's a tremendous amount of women who are just women in general who are technologically savvy but are passed over for these positions. Then he kind of factor in into that fifty percent. How many of them are women who have had to leave the workforce for various reasons that we talked about earlier? There's a tremendous amount of of women out there with skills who aren't being looked at. Where is women who code? And Tara, where are you on changing those numbers from fifty percent too, you know, forty seven percent of forty five percent. Do you have any sort of strategic goals in your office? Numbers wise? Well, for me personally >> and the forewoman who co we wanted basically be able to change the world way. Want to offer all the technical woman in the world a choice for their career letter? So Tara is a >> way to do it to break one particular glasses. Silly, right? And there's also a lot of these scholarships. And olders is to help women to be able to do career, transform native patient change change, for example, Woman Ochoa's part of comeback. We actually handle five awards to recognize five outstanding woman leaders, in our opinion, one of them, she started with a woman who co was a individual member. She was just a junior engineer. But in less than two years periods, she is actually now a VP. Let's fast track. It's very fast track. So we believe in human power and potential way, especially believe in a woman that basically is under representative in a lot of the technology sectors. Our job is to unlock these potential and their barriers and roadblocks in various forms, right big and small. So the job is really to unlock all this way. Want to be able to move the needle up to towards the right direction with all these things that we're doing >> last thing here, let's finish with how you yourself have broken through many, many levels of glass ceilings to get where you are tonight. Share with us a little bit about your career journey. >> Micro Journey is recently about two and a half years ago, I moved from our indie world to strategy transformation office. It's a it's a one of these moments, I would say, is a glass a cliff, Right? You're standing at the edge of this glasses ceiling house and you're just about to plunge it in. That was the feeling I got two and a half years ago. But you know what? I am so loving it. It is basically the best occur decision I've ever made because there was a dimension that I could never have the experience and seeing before because I spent that case in R and D. A beautiful. A lot of these no hot and competency, and I just work with the business world. But in the transformation office, we do nto way actually bridged to world together. So basically, for me it was a fantastic learning journey, and it's just empowerment and the trust I got from the awards executives and all Michael workers, I feel like that is probably >> the most a transformative decision I ever made. It's not just your shifting technology field with the technical world. I literally shift >> into a buy one hundred eighty degree to a difference by truck. But my job is to connect Tonto and stretch together, which is something that I feel has profound impact for the company. And I just love every minute of it. Oh, >> and I love that. That's that's a great story. And it sounds like what you're doing. You're just at the beginning of all of what? Your transformation. So I can't wait. You know you next year. Thank you. Every great thing that happened to the rest of twenty nineteen. Really? Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Lisa Martin here, watching the Cube coming to you from women Transforming technology. Fourth annual BMO. Thanks for watching

(techno music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here at Barcelona, Spain of Cisco LIVE! Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, and Dave Vellante here this week covering all the action in cloud, data center, multi-cloud. Our next is Jim Frey who's the Vice President's alliances at Kentik Technologies. Groundbreaking report that came of the Amazon Reinvent Conference. A lot of customers. Part of the multi-cloud discussion. Jim, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. It's Frye by the way. >> Frye. I'm sorry. >> Okay. No worries. No worries. >> Multi-cloud, your report has some interesting data. Talk about the survey, the results. What is is telling us? >> Yeah, we've been working hard at Kentik on extending our solution to start covering the cloud, multi-cloud server hybrid environments. And so we were at the AWS re:Invent show and we decided to take the opportunity to talk to some of the attendees and just sort of get their view of what some of the challenges are. So we talked to a little over 300 of em and we asked them a few questions not a, you know, rigorous thing, you're doing it on the show floor, right? But we found some really interesting things out of that. So the first thing is is that it really is a multi-cloud world already. More so even in hybrid. And so we had nearly 60 percent. 58 percent of the people who we talked to had more than just one of the cloud in play. They almost all had AWS of course cause it was an AWS event, but not all, of which is really interesting. But, you know, they either had AWS plus Google or plus Azure or plus some other cloud. More so than even hybrid. And so we also asked, are you using AWS in conjunction with you know, your own private data center or a third party host to go low center. Only 33 percent were doing that. So, we were surprised. And the reason that that is really significant is monitoring in management of these environments is much more complex in a, well. It's complex in a hybrid environment. It's even more complex in a multi-cloud environment. So it sounds like there's some real need for some help there. >> What are the challenges and what are the some of the complexities? What are the challenges in the monitoring? >> Well, so that was the next question. What's the key challenge, ya know? And usually whenever you ask someone about the challenges, the number one answer is always, oh, security is my biggest concern. That did not turn out to be the case here. The biggest overriding concern across all the different sort of levels of people we talked to was actually cost management. And cost management is, it was a bit surprising. You know, but, usually, you hear security, security, security and then something else. This was cost management either number one or number two. And number one for most of the constituencies. And in some of the subgroups, like VP level, SVP level, architect level, it was overwhelmingly the first choice. 40 and 50 percent of them are saying yeah, cost control is their biggest issue. Even ahead of other things like performance, like visibility, like actual, you know, control of the environment. You know, its cost was really the biggest concern. That's the big issue. >> Jim, something we've been tracking especially at shows like this, at the Cisco show is the challenges I used to understand kind of the stuff I had in my data center. I could get my arms around it. I might not love the management tools that I have. I might complain about some of the cost. But, it's all very well understand. It's bought most of the cap and freight. When you get to the public cloud, like totally understand what you are saying. multi-cloud. Now I've got all these different pieces and how will I have them defined. There's different skill sets between them. >> Right >> And when it comes to cost, right, the big unknown is oh wait, am I getting surprised by what happens, in that environment and across all them, I mean, I've talked to plenty of companies that will dedicate an engineering resource just to manage cloud or >> Right. >> I have many friends in the industry that are helping you know, cost optimization is something that is, you know, software consulting, there's huge business in that because we're still early in this getting to the steady stage. Help us connect the dots. Where does Kentik play into this then. So you talk to all these customers. >> Thank you. Our viewpoint is network and we're trying to give a viewpoint of what's happening in this environment by watching the network. And that's always super valueable because it helps you localize where things are, you know, what activity's happening and it helps you see, you know, which workloads are talking to which workloads. And that reveals sometimes things you don't expect. And this is where the cost control come in because you know, the cloud environment, you have to pay for certain network traffic. Especially between availability zones or when you're shipping it out of the cloud back to your other, you know, your home environment. And we have talked to a lot of customers who have said, hey, end of the month comes around, I get my bill and there's this big number there for data, you know, transfer. I don't know what drove that. And why am I being surprised time and time again by this. Well then there were viewpoints really awesome for seeing that. And if you can do it with a monitoring system that's watching for that all the time, the good news is that you can catch it, figure it out if it's real or not, needed or not, and fix it before 20 days later you get a big, fat bill. >> What does fixing it mean, does it mean like keeping it contained in the cloud, or on frame, or managing what's moving around? >> Could be combination of things, one of the things that we've seen in some of our earlier deployments are someone moved a workload into a different availability zone. Well, there was an application dependency they didn't recognize. And, you know, that workload was talking to, you know, home datacenter, or the another availability zone, and creating traffic across there and just running up the meter on the network costs. So if you can see that and it becomes very obvious to watch the traffic patterns. You can at least have someone go say, Hmm, okay, that's a surprise. They had a big rise to my zone to zone traffic or my, you know, cloud to home traffic. Let's just take a look to who's driving that and whether something that should be or shouldn't be. >> One of the interesting trends we've been watching on scene with cloud and hybrid cloud is kind of the consumption and deployments of cloud and hybrid's interesting because hybrid's with a cloud operation on premise. Which is been slowest to deploy. WikiBound's done a lot of research on private cloud and why that's happening. But it seems that clouds sprawl on the public side has been there. So yeah, I've got some Amazon, easy to stand up. I've got some Azure and now Google. So it's probably easier to get stuff in the clouds and then now they've got repurpose on premise to kind of have this seamless cloud native environment and Cisco's announcements, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah >> So as that's happened, what have you guys learned and scene in terms of the customer behavior. They wake up obviously, the bills are higher, so makes sense that the cloud is higher than hybrid and the cost containment is a concern. How did they get there? What are you seeing? And what's the psychology the customer just share some insight into the customer behavior. >> Well. >> Oh shoot, I got to unwind this, do I double down? What's going on? >> I think it really depends a lot on what the projects are, what the objectives are and what the skillset is. But one of the things that we found in this survey is that, network viewpoint that helps you understand what's really happening in the production environment is often being underutilized or underappreciated in the cloud environments, in the cloud, you know, deployments in cloud infrastructure. So one of the things we asked about was, how many of you folks at this event are actually taking advantage of, for instance, VPC Flow Logs, which can tell you exactly what's happening with an AWS, and between the availability zones. And it was surprising, they've been around, VPC Flow Logs have been around for years as a technology and as an additional service available. But, only about a third of the response were actually using them. So they weren't taking advantage of this important insight and viewpoint ceilometery set. About a third kind of knew about em, but wasn't using em yet. And then another third didn't even know what they were. >> Yeah. >> So I think there's still some maturity happening some maturation happening in terms of understanding what can I do about this? How can I get ahead of this? What's at my disposal? So part of the challenge of course then is that I have that piece covered, but as you said now, how do I cover my home, you know, home front? And where do I find, you know, some sort of tools that can be put these things together so I can see it all as one. >> That's where you guys fit in. >> That's where we fit in, yeah. >> So let me get some anecdotes from you. One it's clear that's a, there's a pain point. Take the aspirin. Understand what's going on, contain the bills. Is, give a scenario of what they're doing to contain the, you mentioned a few of them, but also to give an example of where they're using the data to be proactive, so there's the vitamin side of it. The vitamin, aspirin, whatever metaphor. So, you know, I've got contain my cost, I get that. How are people using the data to be more proactive in either architecting or deploying? >> So I think the, I don't know that anyone's being proactive yet. That is certainly the promise and the opportunity. Most organizations are simply want to be more aware of what happened. Or more affectively reactive and you start there. And once you start to realize, hey, I can do this then you can start turning toward being more proactive. So, for instance our solution was built to allow you to trigger corrective actions back to the environment. We don't take the actions, but we can trigger the systems that would change configurations or change policy and then form those systems of, you know, what's happening and what sort of parameters can we recognize that indicated and issue? So we believe that in especially watching the change in patterns of activity, noticing the anomalies. Anomaly detection often times used around security use cases. We do that. But also, it should be applied to operational use cases. When does a new workload pop up or a new, you know, volume of traffic show up that they didn't expect? And if it's something that I recognize happens at a regular basis and I know the answer, let's automate the corrective response. So that's kind of our theory of provide you the understanding of what's happening then with the tools to trigger and automatic corrective action. >> Alright, so Jim, we're talking a lot about multi-cloud this week with Cisco. Of course, you know, Cisco dominant in the networking space. Really feeling out where they live in multi-cloud, how networking plays across all of them. What's the relationship between Kentik and Cisco? How does that work? >> Thanks, so we're a member of CSPP Program. We are a partner. We joined because we manage a lot of Cisco gear. (laugh) So, a lot of our customers have Cisco. A lot of our use cases, historically, have been at the edge of the network, in particular the service providers. So, those that are delivering internet services or using the internet to reach their customers in some way. So, what's really different about us is we do a really deep and detailed approach of integrating a path, BGP path data, PGP rev data and correlating that with the traffic. As well with other enhancements, and augmentations of the data that give business and service context to the network traffic. Makes it more actionable. >> Yes, and what are you doing in the container space? You mentioned edge computing got some interesting use cases maybe explain a little bit where you play there? >> So when I say edge, I'm saying internet edge, not EDGE computing, although we're fascinated by what EDGE computing represents and the new challenges that's going to bring. Now when it comes to containers, actually we're very fascinated working in that area too, because, Jon, as you mentioned, moving and implementation of new cloud workloads is cloud native, using Kubernetes, using things like Gist T O, you know, that changes the environment once again. So, we've actually built a connector into Kubernetes so that we can use that to pull service information, you know, in terms of what workloads, what containers are out there. What are they doing? What's there purpose? So when we show you activity map of, you know, site to site communications we can say, here are the actual, you know, services that are being, participating in this activity. Its G was another place where we're really interested in to look at the service mesh, you know, that's being set up to run and operate communication between containers. Cause that's a new sort of virtual cloud network. It's a way that these containers are communicating. and again, the more you understand about the communication patterns, the better you can recognize problems, the better you can balance and plan, the better you really get a handle on what's really happening. >> Jim, I want to get your thoughts on since you brought up edge of the internet, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, data moves around, certainly brings up the question of which routes the packets are moving around? There's always been debates but SL lays around, you know, direct connection versus go through the internet? Is China looking at it? So, there's a security kind of concern. >> Yep. >> What's the trend that you're seeing with respect to say either direct connects, cause I'm a company that I have multiple clouds. I have the connections in there. I'm concerned about latency, certainly cost, you know, whether it's cat videos or whatever, or application too. It still costs money. >> Yep. >> So latency's important so each cloud is its own kind of latency issues. What have you seen? >> Well, getting to the cloud and then within the cloud. >> Yeah, exactly. So it's complicated. So, this is a new dynamic, but it's similar concept. Is there standard latencies? Is it getting better? What's the trend look like? >> That's a great question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for you. But I recognize and agree that those are common concerns that we hear. And the best thing at least for what Kentik is doing is to provide the means to measure and understand that. So you can compare what's working. You can, you know, document a baseline, your different options and your different paths, and recognize when there's a real problem occurring. When you start to see latencies spike to any particular cloud service or location or zone so that you can try and get on top of it and figure it. >> That's a classic case of evolution. Get it instrumented. >> Yeah. >> Get the providers, get better what there services. That's the out of, really out of your hands. >> Yeah. >> That's not really. Okay, so, getting back to the survey kind of wrap things up. Interesting it said Amazon the biggest cloud show Azure pops up on the list as pretty high. >> It sure does. >> Makes sense Microsoft's got great performance. I mean Azure's kind of like, they move a lot of stuff into Azure preexisting Microsoft stuff plus they're investing. What's the bottom line summary as you kind of, you know, the aroma of the rapport. What's coming out of the rapport? What's the key insights that you can glean out of this? >> So I think it indicates normal pattern of adoption, and sort of we're growing into this marketplace. It's evolving as we go, you know. We saw big early-end option hopping in like lift and ship approaches to just move stuff into the cloud. Throw it in the cloud. It's going to be cheaper. It doesn't turn out to be cheaper. It can be. Then you've got another, you know, set of organizations that are born in the cloud, right? And they've started out from the beginning. So those two early approaches are merging into how do we really use this as a true, strategic approach to I.T.? What are the real world complexities we're going to deal with? And how are we going to deal with those? It's really no different from the way that technology has evolved within traditional data centers. And why, the way virtualization came in and changed the way we build and architect datacenters. It's awesome. It's great. It save you money in one area, but then it created huge blindspots, cause you couldn't tell what was going on in those virtualization layers, so we had to adapt our operational monitoring, and operational practices to accommodate the new technology. I think we're going through the same thing now with cloud. People recognize that they don't necessarily want to be holded to a single cloud provider. They want alternatives. They want, you know, cost competitiveness. They want redundancy. And so multi-cloud, I think, is becoming more and more real in part because people don't want to put all of their eggs in that one basket. >> And cost certainly looks good on paper at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> But then as you said, there's side effects. It's a system so there's consequences to the system. >> Yes, absolutely. >> When you start growing or whatever. And that's just where people have to work it better. Right? >> Yep. >> That's pretty much the operational. >> I mean, let's apply the same rigor that we used to apply to traditional data center environments. And let's start embracing the cloud, right? >> So, Jim, you've talked about the multi-cloud bid. Why don't you put a fine point on it. There's a reason why you jump from being an analyst into the vendor world. Some people on the outside will be like, well, you know, cloud's been going on for ten years, seems we understand where this is going. But, tell us why, you know, now is so important for this multi-cloud environment and the opportunity that you see again. >> Sure. >> In this ecosystem. >> Kentik in particular what we're starting to hear, very loud and clear amongst the what. Our traditional an initial base of customers was facilities based, service providers and digital enterprise that managed big routed networks and needed to understand better control their relationship with the internet and delivery across the internet. There coming to us and saying, hey look. We're splitting. We're adding cloud workloads. So, we're moving our content that we're serving up into the cloud, you know, more and more of our systems are moving into the cloud and we rely on you for this visibility in our production environment. We need you to add this. So, we saw a demand from our customers to, you know, accommodate this and in parallel we're just really inspired by this next generation of cloud native application development. It seems to be starting to reach that point where's it's becoming reality and it's becoming mature, and it's becoming a reliable approach to I.T. That now's the time to really get serious about bringing these other best practices for the traditional world, and applying them there. >> And the survey data has created proved multi-cloud and hybrid all here, costs can run out of control. You've got to work. You've got to operationalize cloud. And same rigor. I love that. Great insights, Jim. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Sure. >> Live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco Live! Europe 2019. It's theCUBE. Day three, or three days of coverage. We'll be back with more, after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> From San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE We are winding things down, or winding things up I'm not quite sure here at the Conga Connect West event 3,000, all dancing with their headphones on silent disco. We're excited to have the launch of a brand new magazine SF Society magazine. The managing director, Nadio Granata. Nadio, congratulations you just launched this today. >> We did yes, thank you, Jeff, yeah. >> So what is the objective, what is this all about? SF Society >> SF Society. It's about raising the profile of the partners in the SalesForce, I can see these guys, >> Like these guys, their profile is raised, so, so what was missing, what motivated, it's a lot of work to do a magazine. >> Okay, it is, it is. It's been a labor of love, I got to tell you that, but, SalesForce is a fantastic job, for SalesForce for its employees, within SalesForce but the partners, we want to raise an independent voice of the partners. And we talk about success, we talk about philanthropy, we talk about all the great things that going on, and most importantly the community. So that's what the magazine is about. >> There's just one problem though, Nadio. How many of these did you print? (laughing) >> Well, you know, I've got to be cautious, I had to be cautious, but we've printed, we've printed 5,000 for today, it's online and we expect to generate about 100,000 readership very, very quickly. >> Okay good, but I got good news and bad news. >> Go on. >> Did you hear the keynote? >> Yes I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> How many people are here? >> Oh I know there's a lot of people here. >> 171,000. So you, 5 plus 100, you got to go back to the printer. >> We're cautious, we're cautious. >> Alright, alright good. >> Thank you. >> So who's supporting this? Are you getting advertising to support it, how's it being supported? >> Yes, it's sponsored by advertisers, so Conga of course a great advertiser in there, we've got NataBox in there, we've got New Voice Media, we've got FRG, we've got loads of companies >> Have you got more magazines? >> Very positive, very positive >> Get those out of here. >> So, sponsored by advertising and that's the way forward. >> And how often does it come out? >> Quarterly. It's a quarterly magazine. >> A quarterly magazine. >> Ya it's global, we've got content from all over the world and we're looking to grow, it's a 48 page production, we're looking to grow that as we go forward. >> Kay, what's the online address, for people who need more information. >> Okay www.sfsocietymagazine.com >> Sfsocietymagazine.com check it out >> Yeah, that's not easy to say >> Quick, there's only 4,999 of em left and you're competing with 170,000 people. Alright. >> But get it online, guys, get it online. >> Get it online. Alright, Nadio thanks for taking a few minutes and nothing but best of luck on this thing. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Nadio, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE we're at Conga, Connect West and SalesForce downtown San Francisco, come on down the party's just beginning. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. it's The Cube covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and The Cube's Ecosystem Partner. (upbeat music) (people chatting in background) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is The Cube exclusive coverage live in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-host of The Cube here all week, two days of live wall-to-wall coverage in the DevNet Zone where all the action's at. It's the biggest story at Cisco Live is the impact of the DevNet and the developer network that's been growing leaps and bounds. Of course, we covered DevNet Create earlier last year, which is a Cloud Native event. Kind of bring in two communities together from Cisco and of course, we can't talk about developers without talking about experiences that developers need and want and expect and also, you know, how to operate in those environments. We have two great guests. Mandy Whaley's been on before, The Cube Alumni Director of Developer Experiences at Cisco, and Tom Davies, who's the Senior Manager of the DevNet Sandbox. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again. >> Excited to be here. Yeah, good to see you, too. >> So congratulations. >> DevNet is again booming. It's the hot part of the show. It's one of the top stories here in Barcelona. >> Yes. >> It's been great. Our workshops, where we're doing the hands-on coding, have been extremely full even early in the morning and late into the evening, and it's great to see people really diving in, laptops open, getting their hands on, and doing some coding. >> That's great stuff, congratulations. And, you know, the Sandbox is interesting because now you guys are completely open. Love the motto: learn, code, inspire, and connect. That's the motto here. You got to have a place for people to do this. >> You do. >> What is this Sandbox thing that you guys are rollin' out? It's pretty interesting. >> Yeah, so the Sandbox is completely open to everyone, and the idea behind it is if you like, if you can go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, you can hit our catalog and start playing with our technology within minutes by just clicking on the technology you want to cover. We'll spin you up that environment, and you can start playing it as a developer really quite quickly. >> Alright, take me through a progression example, because let's just say I hit that website, developer.cisco.com/sandbox, >> Yeah. what do I do? I mean, what are people doing? Is it like, you know, Hello World or what are they coding? What are they learning? I mean, what's goin' on there? >> It just depends on the technology that they choose. So we go to developer.cisco.com/sandbox, hit Catalog, it comes out with a bunch of titles, and in that catalog, you can choose Networking, you could choose Security, you could choose Data Center, Cloud, Open Source, any different technology that that developer might be interested in or want to integrate into, and then from there they click on that title and say, "Right, I want to reserve say APIC-EM. "I'm interested in Networking and control of Networking." From there, we spin that environment up for them, completely secure, send them the details of how it's connect, they connect to it, and then they are free to start coding within minutes on, say, a APIC-EM controller solution, figure out what the latest release provides them, >> Yeah. how they integrate into it, and how they can start innovatin' in a really easy way over the top. >> So they can, it's a playground. They can do mash-ups. >> It's a playground, yeah. >> It is. >> I can sling API's around, test stuff, break stuff. >> If they're breaking somethin', they're probably doin' something right so we encourage it. >> Yeah (laughs) >> Yeah. >> It's brilliant. >> Yeah. >> The other thing that's really cool about the Sandbox is that Tom takes a lot of time and care to make sure we put together fully, you know, environments where you can actually build things with the Cisco gear plus open source projects that are relevant to those pieces of the Cisco technology portfolio, so it's not just the environment. It's sample code, it's open source you can use, it's traffic generations, it's really a full working environment. >> Yeah, that brings up a good point I wanted to ask you, as we had some other guests on. We couldn't get to it. You're startin' to see with Kubernetes and well, first docker containers and now all containers. Really interesting. I mean, Red Hat just bought CoreOS yesterday. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's big news. >> They did, they did. >> Big news, yeah. >> In Europe, you miss all the action. The State of the Union. (Tom laughs). >> I know. >> It was a big story on the New York Times on Sunday. I'm like, "Ah, I'm missin' all the late news." But that's a signal. Containers are commoditized. You're seeing that be the now abstraction layer for moving work loads around and program around it. >> We do. >> Kubernetes gives an orchestration opportunity that now allows you to bring this service mesh concept to the table. >> It does. >> This is becoming a really interesting developer dream, because now I could provision >> Yes. microservices and start doing network services with those microservice at the app layer. >> Yeah. >> This to me is a really, really big trend. I know you guys have kind of quietly put it out there, a term called "Net DevOps," >> Yes. which I think will be a very big thing. >> Yep. (Mandy laughs) >> Because it's DevOps the whole stack. >> It is. >> That's right, yeah. >> But really usin' the network more, so for the people who are power users of network services, this could become a very big DevOps movement. >> Yes, yes. >> Can you explain this concept of the Net DevOps, and does that relate to like SDO and some of the service mesh stuff out there? What's your-- >> Yeah, do you want to start with service mesh and then I'll dive into the lower parts or, yeah? >> We can do that. >> Go for it. >> Jump right in. >> Yeah. >> Share the information. >> Yeah, sure. >> The term service mesh is actually fairly new, and it's common because as people use microservices more, their understandin' that they just perforate like crazy, and it's actually really quite hard to understand which microservices talk to which microservices, are they doin' it securely? Are they within policy? Are they talkin' to the right thing? And that's where SDO comes in. It's really providin' a proxy for that traffic so you can easily talk between microservice A and microservice B, understand it, see observability between that traffic, and then control that traffic, and SDO is takin' really the abstraction away, takin' the pain away from that huge service. >> Just talk about the quantify that time savings, because this is like, I think this really kind of was the minds get blown. That example you just laid out, without that, what would you have to do? I have to build a proxy, I have to test it. >> You do. >> I mean, just take me through it. >> Yeah. The comparisons A to B. >> Well, normally when you have >> Real quick. a microservice, you probably have about 15 other services around them all. Like if you had a ton of microservices, you probably have 15 different subserving services around it. With SDO, it takes 15 away so you don't have to manage or operate all those, and it brings you down to one, and that's really super key, 'cause it makes it so much easier to deal with microservices >> Yeah. then to bail them out. >> And then I boil it down, and then I tell people when Amazon launched Lambda, which essentially the serverless trend, 'cause they're always >> Yeah. just services. Never really serverless. (Mandy laughs) I know the Cisco people debate this all the time, and now there's, it's true. This server's behind it. >> Of course. They just take this abstraction away. They're really enabling this notion of a mindset for the developer where this gets into the user experience, user expectation. >> Right. >> Yes. >> If I want infrastructure as a code and I don't want to dive into the network services, I want the one not the 15 to deal with. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> I'm essentially programming the infrastructure at that point, so this is a big, effin' deal. >> This is a big deal, >> It is. and then even what we're seeing is that the expectations are set by DevOps practices, and now that our network devices are opening up APIs, and we have the really strong assurance and analytics pieces that we saw in the Cisco keynotes, we can extend those DevOps concepts to managing network devices. So something very traditional, networking task, like out of VLAN. Let's say you want to do that, but you want to do that in a network as code manner. So you want to take that through a build pipeline, something that would be familiar to a developer or somebody who manages their infrastructure in a DevOps way, but now you can do it for a networking device. And you can take it through build and test just like you would code, and all of your network configurations are source controlled so you have your version control around it, and that's a big mind shift for the network developers. But in DevNet, we have the application developers, the ops engineers, and the net workers, and then what we're tryin' to do is share those practices across because that's the only way we'll get to the scale, the consistency, the level of automation that we need. >> Alright, so here's a question for you guys. Put you on the spot. DevOps has been great. It's going mainstream. Some are called CloudOps, whatever, but DevOps is great, great movement. >> Yes. >> That's been goin' on for a while, you know. Hey. >> Yeah. You know, pat each other on the back. (Mandy laughs) But DevOps means automation. >> Yes, yes. >> Right? >> And the old rule is you got to do it twice automated. This scares people. So what is being automated away in the Net DevOps model? >> So I wouldn't know that it's being automated away, but the idea is that is if we're managing infrastructure, traditionally you would do it in a sequential and manual way, right? But we need to do it in a parallel and automated way. So moving towards that automation helps us do that. I think we see some network engineers who think, "I have to learn a lot of new skills to do this." >> Mm-hmm. >> And that is true, but you don't have to be the level of an application developer who's writing applications to do some automation and scripting, and DevNet's really working to put the tools out there to lead them down that path and get them moving in that direction. It's also a little bit more, I mean, DevOps is definitely the automation in the tools. There's also the culture of bringing Dev and Ops together. So the same thing happens there as well. >> Totally agree, and also the process as well, repeatability in what we're doin'. So once you've done one >> Yes. and that process works for you, you can repeat that process for the next set of configuration you're deploying. >> Yeah, definitely. >> What's interesting. >> Super slick. >> Rowan showed on stage the future titles of what it'll be like in 2030 or 2050. I forget which year it was. >> Yes, yes. I joked, it says the LinkedIn on that. Might not even be around, might be around then, either. (Mandy laughs) This is a new field, right? >> Yes. >> And successful companies, the ethos was hire the smartest person because the jobs that are coming haven't been invented yet, so there's no right experience there. So this kind of reminds me of what's going on with DevOps where, you know, Network guys, they're not dumb. I mean, they're smart, right? >> Super smart. >> You know? >> Yeah. >> And it used to be that you were the rock star if you ran the network. >> That's right, that's right. >> Okay, now the rock stars are more the app developers and the developers on the Dev Op side. So these would be easy, and we're seeing that it's easy for those guys to jump in to some of these coding and/or agile mindsets. >> Yes. >> 'Cause they are gunslingers, they are rock stars. >> They are, it's incredible how fast they're picking it up. I mean, they are, just from the ones that we met from last year to this year who were here came to like their first coding class. This year they're here, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I totally get this build pipeline. "I'm doing this in my organization." We're seeing 'em pick it up incredibly fast. >> And so they obviously see a path to other jobs. What patterns are you guys seeing in terms of things that they're doing on the Sandbox and/or some of the user expectations that they have as they're now fresh, young, or/and middle age >> Yeah. or old students >> Right? in the new world. What are some of the patterns? >> Yeah. >> What are they kickin' tires on? What's the, what are they gravitating towards? >> Everythin', but they yeah, literally everythin', but they're always like quite interested in containers and what's happenin' in the container world and how that applies >> Yes. to networkin', especially because as we touched on it earlier, there's a lot of networkin' to be had in the container world, and it's not just one layer of (mumbles) of the service mesh. There's also virtualization layers, there's like abstracted policy layers. There's a good few layers of networkin' that you need to know and really understand to be able to get into, so that's one real trend that the network guys >> Yes. really are jumpin' on, and so they should, because they're great at it. >> Yeah, I would add to that. Like I've been seeing, you know, in different conversations I have with people who are coming from the appDev side or the Op side and saying, "Wow, I'm really good at containers. "I can build apps and containers all day." And then they get into it, and they're like, "The networking part of containers is hard. "There's a lot to learn." >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so I definitely see a lot of activity around both sides coming together around, "How do we really make that work?" >> And the bottom line is is that this whole "Your job's going away" is ridiculous because this really proves that there is so much job security in DevOps it's ridiculous. >> There's more devices per engineer to be managed then ever before, so it's really just you have to have the automation to even keep up, right? >> Yeah, it's quite funny, actually, because I come from a very much a software centered background, and networkin' to me was black magic. You had to know so much stuff in the networking order, it used to scare the hell out of me, but I had to go down into the network layer to start understandin' it to do a better job of software >> Well, you was locked down. and I'm seein' the reverse. >> I mean, you had perimeter-base security, (Tom laughs) and you had very inflexible configuration management things. You were just >> Yeah. really locked down. >> That's right. Now agile and dyanmic >> And then we're seein'. adaptive, and these are the words that are described. And now add IoT to the mix. You guys had the Black Hat, you know, IoT booth here, >> Yes. which is phenomenal. >> Yes. It's only going to increase the edge of the network, which is not new to Cisco. >> Definitely. Cisco knows the edge. >> That's right. So it's going to be interesting to see that going forward. >> Yeah. >> Definitely. >> And that's one of our sandboxes. We have a sandbox where developers can practice taking docker containers and deploying them into Edge Compute in our routers, and that's one that's really popular and gets a lot of-- >> It's incredibly popular. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Mandy and Tom, thanks for comin' on The Cube. Really appreciate, great to see you again. >> Yeah, thank you so much. >> Congratulations on all your success. Go kick on the tires of the Sandbox. >> It's all down to Mandy. >> Yeah. >> You guys did a great job. >> DevNet developer network for Cisco here, and of course DevNet created in separate small, boutique-event small, for the Cloud Native World. You want to check that out. Well, the Cube will be there this year. This is The Cube live coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay tuned for more of day 2, exclusive Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veen and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, to our live coverage from theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain, for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cofounder and cohost of theCUBE, with my cohost this week, Stu Miniman. Been to many events also, senior analyst at wikibon.com. Stu and I have been breaking down all the action here in the DevNet zone. And we have with us here as our guest, Ashley Roach, who is a principal engineer and evangelist with Cisco. DevNet himself, has full view of what's going on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> Good to see you again. We covered DevNet Create, which was really our first foray into what DevNet was doing outside of the Cisco ecosystem, bringing that cloud-native developer into the Cisco fold. Here, it's the Cisco show where all the Cisco ecosystem and your customers are growing into the cloud and programming with DevNet. So congratulations, it's been phenomenal. It's been one of the top stories we've been covering as DevNet has just been explosive. >> Oh, thanks a lot. It's been a lot of hard work. >> People have been learning, they're coding, they're being inspired, and they're connecting, It's a very sharing culture. Props to you guys and the team. Well done. >> Ashley: Appreciate it. >> So what is DevNet? I mean, this is a cultural shift. We've been reporting on theCUBE all year and last year. But really this year, end of last year, we started really putting the stake in the ground saying we are going to see a renaissance in software development. Linux foundations, reporting that there's going to be exponential growth in code and open-source. You seeing that you can create intellectual property with only 10% of the energy codewise, 90% using open-source. They call that the code sandwich. Again, this is just data that they're sharing, but it points to the bigger trend. Developers are becoming the important part of the equation, and the integration of the stack from network to application, are working together. And again, proof point's there, things like Kubernetes, containers, have obviously been out there for a long time. You're starting to see the visibility for developers. >> Right. >> John: You're at Cisco, you're in the middle of all this. You're seeing one side of the camp and the other. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> What's your view? >> Yeah, I think that's a good, it captures a lot of the dynamics that are going on right now in the environments. And I mean, for me, I come at this from an application developer standpoint. I actually, when I joined Cisco, I was not a hardware guy at all (laughs) Frankly, I'm not even now. I'm much more oriented towards software, and so when we've seen, though, sort of the power of the underlying infrastructure that gets married up to some of these overlay systems like Kubernetes and containers, more and more of the infrastructure on one hand is getting abstracted, which you might think, oh, uh oh. Like, that's a problem. But in reality, the infrastructure still needs to be there, right? You can't run your serverless function out of thin air. >> John: Yeah. >> At least not yet. >> John: It's truly not serverless. There's servers somewhere. >> Yeah, exactly. So, you know, those are the funny jokes that we like to have in the industry, right? But at the same time, you want to think like, okay, well I'm writing my application, I'm a developer. I don't want to know about infrastructure. My whole job is I don't care about that. But there is information and utility in the data that you can get from the infrastructure because at some point, your application will fail. You may have some bugs, and yeah, Kubernetes may kill your container and bring up another one. But you still need to de-bug that issue, and so yeah, you can get tracking, you can get analytics. But also, you can get that stuff from that infrastructure that's underlying it. And so, like one of the presentations I'm doing tomorrow, I wrote just kind of a proof of concept sample app where it's a Spring Boot app that has a built-in health check capability. It ties into APIC-EM and or DNA Center and uses that information that's available about the network. So maybe it's your, from your firewall to your application, you can run a path trace and just have that happen every five minutes or something like that, or check the health of an entire environment every, you know, so often. And then your application can resolve issues or have just data about it so that we can keep moving. >> Yeah, actually, you know, I love that comment you talked, you know, you're not a hardware person, and that's okay. >> Ashley: Right. >> And there's lots of people here at the Cisco show that aren't. That's a change from just a few years ago. How is that dynamic changing? You know, I remember for a few years I was arguing like every networking person needs to become a coder and there's, you know, push back and people are scared and what's going to happen to my job and can I learn that skill set? >> Ashley: Right. >> The bar for entry seems pretty low these days but how do we translate some of those languages? >> Yeah, I think that perception of say, an ops person becoming a programmer, it's not really the right mindset. >> Right. >> There's a couple mindsets, though, that are important. So one of the things we're trying to do is foster the DevOps culture somewhat. And to do that, an ops person has to understand and have empathy for the problems that exist on the application side and vice versa. So for us, we're just trying to education people in that vein. >> John: Yeah. >> But all of the infrastructure is now also automatable and you don't have to automate at low level. You can automate it with things like Ansible, which is a bit more accessible for people that haven't been programming for a long time. So, you know, I think those are the things that we see and that we're trying to encourage within our community and just broadly speaking, I would say, in the industry. >> You brought up empathy, interesting. Because this is a cultural shift, right? So this mindset, this cultural DNA, you have to have empathy. But it's kind of like the Venn diagram. Empathy is one circle. >> Ashley: Mhm. >> Feasibility is another and viability is the other, right? >> Ashley: Mhm. >> So it's always in context to what you can get done, right? So you guys at DevNet have a good view of the development environment. What are some of the challenges and what are the opportunities for folks in the Cisco ecosystem to get their hands dirty, get down and dirty with the tech-- >> Ashley: Oh, yeah. >> Where they can do feasible, viable projects that are possible. Well, seeing Python certainly is one approach. Great for data wrangling, but you know, you got Node.js out there, has been a great language. >> Ashley: Yep. >> App guys are doing Node.js because of JavaScript in server-side. >> Ashley: Yep. >> You got a lot of IO that sounds like a network service mindset. Is there things that you see going on around that what's possible and what's kind of moonshot like projects and where should people start? >> Well, I think, again, kind of going to this historical point of view, it used to be you had one programming book and you're sitting there, you know, late at night copying code from that. And maybe it came with a CD and you could download, you know, your sample code onto your hard drive. And then, you know, you'd be sitting there flipping back and forth and then you hit an issue. You're like, I don't know what to do. Maybe you're trying to teach yourself. I don't have any friends that are programmers. I mean, today, with, I built the vast amount of resources that are available online. You know, like, we have our DevNet Learning Labs. And so that's the set of tutorials that we've provided, but that's not the only thing out there. You've got Code School, Codeacademy. You've got the loops out there. I mean, shoot, MIT, Stanford, they're all putting their courseware in open-source. So the universe of educational material for people to understand this stuff and get started is really, really awesome now. And then also, it's easier than ever, I think,. to actually code because you're, again, like code is becoming more and more abstract at higher level languages. So Python, Node.js, those are still kind of low level, but there are packages on top of those, you know, middleware and Node.js, to build a web server. You get Express or sales or whatever, and then you're kind of off to the races. Like Spring Boot is crazy. It used to be Spring was a bit of a pain in the butt with, you know-- >> Yeah. >> Ashley: All the dependency, injection and everything. But with Spring Boot, now you just add, you know, a dependency, and you've got an entire web framework or an authorization framework or whatever. And that was like, I was pretty blown away when I started seeing-- >> So it's a lot easier. >> It's, yeah, it's just a lot easier. Things are more curated. You have certain stacks. You know, it used to be LAMP stack, now you got ELK stack for data things, you got, you know, and so on. So the universe is wide open for a lot of people to program today. >> So Ashley, love the training angles that you talked about there. But what I bring to mind, a little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about here-- >> Ashley: Ooh, good programmer buzzword there. >> But one that John and I have been asking about, you mentioned open-source. >> Yes. >> So obviously, things like Spring, lot of things you mentioned are open-source. >> Yes. >> But what about Cisco's, you know, involvement in the community, giving back to open-source. What's the philosophical, you know, viewpoint-- >> Yeah. >> From Cisco's standpoint? >> Yeah, we're active in open-source. We're big contributors to OpenStack, for example. You know, we've got some of, we've created like a CNI module for Kubernetes called Contiv. And so that's in open-source. We, you know, in DevNet, we publish tons of things in open-source, just code samples and you know, example projects and so on. Cisco's actually a big contributor to the Linux kernel, so it's a long legacy of open-source at Cisco. So it's part of our culture. >> So there's no restrictions on everybody going on GitHub, throwing their stuff in, being part of the communities-- >> There's certainly restrictions. Yeah, we have processes that we're supposed to follow. I mean, we got to protect the intellectual property when we need to. I mean, it's the way it is for working at a company. But at the same time, you know, there is viable processes if it makes business sense to open-source things. >> I mean, the line John's used, you know, for the last year or so, is GitHub, that's people's resumes these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So we want to make sure, what I'm saying is it sounds like the ecosystem at Cisco, friendly for the developers to come in, participate. You got a business to run, obviously. Legal keeps their eye on stuff, but you know, Cisco's out there. We saw it in the container ecosystem, OpenStack-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Stu: Kubernetes, Linux, absolutely-- >> Yeah. >> Stu: Not just even in networking but beyond that. See a lot of Cisco out there, so-- >> Yeah, great. >> So my question for you, personal question. If you could talk to your 22 year old self right now-- >> Ashley: Oh, wow, yeah. >> You're high school, actually, you're college or college graduate, what would you say to yourself knowing what you know now? 'Cause this is a really interesting point. I mean, at my age, we used to build stuff straight up from the bottom of the stack to the top, and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Now you're really kind of getting into some engineering here and then some composite Lego block kind of thinking where these frameworks could just snap together. Sometimes (mumbles) But it's a lot cooler now. I mean, I wish I was 22. What would you say to your 22 year old self out there? What would you advise yourself? What would you say to yourself? >> Where's my smoking jacket? (John laughs) Yeah, so, I mean, I was a liberal arts undergrad and I did take computer programming classes. So I did a couple courses in C toward the end of my time in university, and that's because I've always been interested in technical, you know, in programming and stuff. But I think probably I would have maybe stayed another year to try to maybe get an actual CS degree. So that might be one thing, I think the other-- >> John: What would you jump on today if you saw all of this awesome code, open-source? I mean, like, it's like open bar in the coding party. I mean-- >> Yeah, it's overwhelming. >> It's so many things to jump on and-- >> You know, obviously, joking, I should say blockchain and machine learning and AI, right? But actually, I would say the machine learning and AI stuff is probably a good, interesting, you know, wave of technology, yeah. >> I just want to, you know, we're talking about your 22 year old self. How about your kids? >> Ashley: Yeah. >> You're working with your kids, checking out your GitHub on there. So, you know, maybe share, you know, younger people. You know, how do they get involved? In the keynote yesterday, it was, you know, jobs of the future. >> Right, well, yeah. For my kids, I have two daughters. And so, I try to encourage them to at least be familiar with coding. I've tried to teach them Linux some, but we've done programming classes, but it's kind of hard sometimes to get them interested in something like programming, to be honest. So some of it's trying to be creative problem solvers, trying to craft that sort of attitude, you know. So that then, when they do get the opportunity to do some programming, that they'll be interested about it. >> I mean, the young kids love gaming. Gaming's a good way to get people in. >> Yep. >> VR is now an interesting-- >> I mean, Minecraft and Sims, those are the two that my oldest daughter loves. I mean, the thing I remember that's the funniest was when you know, of course, this was when we all got computers back in the day and we did keyboards, right, in order to do stuff. So I got the first iPad when it came out and I brought it home and my daughter, who was, I think, six or eight at the time, she's like, "Cool, I understand this." Like automatically understood it. But then, she went to the TV and it had icons on it. So she walked up to the TV and tried to do that, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny." Like her mental model is this. >> Yeah. >> Where our mental model was that and so on earlier on. >> My oldest son says, "Dad, search engine is so your generation," (Ashley laughs) Not even email, like search, Google search. >> Yeah, the digital, it's like the digital native thing. On the other hand, we actually are fairly restrictive about like cell phone and mobile because it's a lot. That sort of thing. They really, really are going to face some interesting, I don't know, social, you know, the social things that you have in high school and middle school now multiplied and amplified through all that. We're sort of cautious, too, as parents, you know. >> Lot of societal issues to deal with. Alright, now getting back to DevNet here, I want to get your thoughts because we had a big setup here. One of the things that the folks people can't see on camera is we're in the DevNet zone. You see behind us, but there's everywhere else around. It's really the big story at Cisco Live and has been for awhile. Every year it gets bigger. It's like, it keeps growing in interest. What do you guys show here? What's the purpose? Give a little quick, take a minute to explain the DevNet approach this year-- >> Okay. >> John: And how it's different-- >> Yeah. >> John: And how you guys take this going forward. >> So the DevNet zone, philosophically, we tried to have the experiential. We don't want people to come in here and get death by PowerPoint of hey, check out this awesome new product that we created. You know, that kind of thing. >> Yeah. >> Instead, we want people to come in and have the opportunity to sit down, either by themselves or with a friend or, you know, with one of us to be able to work through sort of tutorials so that we have this area of the Learning Labs or learn about the DevNet sandbox. That's another area that we have where that is a sort of try it out, live, always-on, cloud service that we provide for anyone. We also have, of course, examples of example use cases. So we have some IOT and collaboration use cases that we're demonstrating in the new APIs that have come out of those products that you wouldn't think may be necessarily, oh, collaboration and IOT really are connected. But in fact, you know, ultimately you need to get a human involved when you have exceptions. And in a lot of cases like for edge compute scenarios, it's exception oriented. So when we, the example that we have here is we have a truck that's sitting on a handcrafted scale that's like a raspberry pie thing that one of our evangelists, Casey Bleeker, made. And it's putting, you know, analog data into our container that's running on an edge device. And when an exception occurs when the scale has this truck on it with too many stones in the back, then it triggers an alert. It creates a team room for people to come and escalate and discuss. It'll make a phone call automatically to the truck driver and pull people together to deal with that situation. But then, additionally, we have a new room capabilities with like, our telepresence systems. And that has face identification, not like from identifying the user standpoint, but it knows it can count how many people are in the room, for example. So if you combine that sort of IOT capability with this collaboration unit that's going to already be there, you're getting kind of a win-win of that infrastructure in the rooms. >> Ashley, talked about there's so many different things going on there, what's exciting you the most? Where are you seeing the most people, you know, gravitating around? >> Yeah, in the DevNet zone in general? >> Well, it can be here or in general, yeah. >> Well, I think one thing in the DevNet zone, we also have a white hat black hat challenge. So that's been very, very popular. What we're doing is demonstrating using, you know, off the shelf hacker tools, how vulnerable some IOT devices are to give people. It's kind of a you've heard about it, now experience it and do it yourself to see how easy it really is. And then see, of course, how our solutions can help you mitigate those problems. So that's, you know, IOT security is a big concern, I think, in general, and so I think that's an exciting spot for people-- >> So hands-on learning, very people-oriented, very open-- >> Yes, yep. >> The motto I love, I'm reading on the thing there, learn code, inspire, connect. So learn, toe in the water, connect-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Share. >> Yeah. >> Mentor, collaborate. >> The other thing that we're sort of soft launching, I guess, is we have a new application developer site on DevNet, and so-- >> John: What's the URL? >> It is developer.cisco.com/site/app-dev. >> John: Okay, that's good. Memorize that, quiz later. >> Yeah. >> That's long, just search. >> Yeah, right, right. >> Hey, Alexa. >> Right, so, but with that, we're trying to make it easier for people to understand the use cases for what kinds of applications they can build using our technology. So indoor location, using kind of doing maps and heat maps and building that kind of scenario, for example. >> Awesome. >> Ashley: Through T-Mobile and video and such. >> As you are evangelizing your engine on the engineering side, what's the plans going forward? Post-event, obviously, you've got Cisco Live in Orlando this year, it's in 2018. >> Ashley: Yeah, we have-- >> But you guys got a lot of these going on, you got a lot of digital content. What's the outreach plan? Where should people expect to see you guys? Share the going forward plan. >> Yeah, I wish I knew where everyone was going to be. So thankfully, on the website-- >> They're on the internet! >> We have an events calendar, so I would definitely encourage you to look there if you're interested in connecting with one of us. We have the Cisco Live in Melbourne then Orlando. We also have DevNet Create in April and that's in Mountain View, I think, Bay Area. So would love to have people come out to that, and kind of the theme of that last year, which was the inaugural one, continues this year, which is where apps need infrastructure. So we want to kind of continue this conversation about DevOps, how, you know, applications and infrastructure-- >> John: Yeah. >> Can benefit each other. >> And just for the folks watching, theCUBE was at the inaugural DevNet Create. We'll be there again, we'll also be in Orlando. And again, this is important, we'll end on this point. I'd like you to take a minute to explain the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create because this is really interesting. I like the way you guys are doing this. It's really open, but it's pretty transparent. So share the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. >> Yeah, so DevNet is our developer program, and so that's a website-- >> Before Cisco and-- >> It's Cisco, it's oriented towards those things. DevNet Create is more about forming a community to solve these problems about applications and infrastructure. So that intersection, whether you call it DevOps, whether you call it I don't know what, potatoes and you know, something. Something in there, you know, there is this fluid spot where applications are looking more like infrastructure, infrastructure is starting to look more like applications. So what does that mean and how do we explore that together to, you know-- >> We call it cloud-native. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> It's a set of developers who just, like you, don't really want to get involved in network but love it to be more magical. >> Right. >> Right? And Cisco folks love Cisco because they're in that world, right? So-- >> Yes. >> To me, it's really interesting you guys do that. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thanks. And it's not just for Cisco people, right? So Cisco Live and DevNet Zone is that. For Create, it's actually the inverse. We encourage people from the community to come and check it out as opposed to the-- >> John: Props to you guys, great stuff. Cisco, DevNet Zone is where theCUBE is. Of course DevNet Create is going to be outside of the Cisco ecosystem. Connecting the two is really the key. We're living in a world, global connected devices, connected people, that's the mission of Cisco. Love that vision, but of course, we're theCUBE, bringing you the live content here in Barcelona. All, of course, is available online, youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, thecube.net is our new site. Check it out. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage coming from Barcelona with theCUBE after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from midtown Manhattan it's theCUBE covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and it's ecosystem sponsors. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Big Data NYC for all the access. It's our fifth year doing our own event in New York City. The hashtag is BigDataNYC. Also, in conjunction with Strata Hadoop, used to be called Hadoop World, then Strata Hadoop. Now, it's called Strata Data as they try to grope to where the future's going to be. A lot of hype over there. A lot of action. But here as where we do the intimate interviews and the stories. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Emma McGrattan who is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Actian. Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> We love having everyone from Ireland cause the accidents great traction. So, I appreciate you coming on. Have a beer later at the pub. New York's got to lot of great Irish pubs. In all seriousness, we've had Actian on before. Mike Hoskins has been on. We had Jeff Veis on yesterday giving us the marketing angle of hybrid data that you guys are doing. What's under the hood? Because Actian has a lot of technology in their portfolio through how you guys had your growth strategy. But now as the world wants to bring it together you're seeing some real critical trends. >> Emma: Right. >> A lot of application development where data's important. Huge amount of security challenges. People are trying to build out and bring security out of IT. And then you've got all this data covering stuff. That's just on the top line. Then you got IOT. So, people are busy. Their plates are full, and data's the center of it. So, what are you guys doing to bring all of Actian together? >> Emma: That's a great question, perfect question for Actian. So, we have in Actian a number of products in the portfolio. And we believe that best fit product. So, if you're doing something like graph database, it doesn't make sense to put a Vector in Hadoop solution against that. And we've got the right fit technology for what we're doing. And for IOT we've got an embedded database that's as small as 30 megs. So, I've got PowerPoint files that are bigger than this database. You put it in a device, set it, it can run for 20 years. You never have to touch it. But all that data that's being generated typically you're generating it because you want, at some point, to be able to analyze it. And we've gone in the portfolio and Vector in Hadoop has the ability to take that data from the IOT sources and perform very high-speed analytics on that. So, the products that we have within the portfolio are focused around data integration, so pulling data into an environment where you're going to perform analysis or otherwise operationalize that data, data management. A lot of our customers are just doing CRM, ERP applications on our product platforms. And then the analytics is where I get really excited cause there's so much happening in the analytics world in terms of new types of applications being built, in terms of real time requirements, in terms of security and governance that you're talking about in reference in your question. And we've got a unique solution that can address all of those areas in our Vector in Hadoop products. So, it's interesting that we see the name Hadoop coming out of the show this week because we see that the focus on Hadoop kind of moving to the background and where the real focus is around the data and not so much-- >> And the business value. >> I hate to sound cliché about outcomes but we were joking on theCUBE yesterday and kind of can't coin the term, "Outcomes as a service." Which is kind of a goof on the whole, "It's about the outcomes." Which is a cliché in tech. But that really is the truth. At the end of the day, you've got a business goal. But the role of data now in real time is key. You're seeing people want real time. Not real time response with old data, they want the real data. So, people are starting to look at data as a really instrumental part of the development process. Similar with DevOps did with infrastructure as code, people want data to be like code. >> Emma: Exactly. >> And that is a hard >> Architectural challenge. So, if you go into your customer base what do you guys tell them? And I was going to the hybrid cloud as the marketing message. But I have challenged, I'm the CXO. I'm the CDO. I'm the CIO. I'm the CFO, COO, whatever the person making these huge, sweeping operational cost decisions. What's the architecture? Cause that's what people are working on right now. And how do you present that? >> Right. So, we recognize the fact that everybody's got a very distributed environment. And part of the message around hybrid data is that data can be generated pretty much any place. You may be generating data in the cloud with your own custom applications. You may be using salesforce.com or NetSuite or whatever. And you've got your on-premise sources of data generation. And what we provide in Actian is the ability to access all of that data in real time, and make it part of the applications that you're deploying that is going to be able to react in real time to changes. You don't want to be acting on yesterday's data because things have happened, things have moved on. So, the importance of real time is not lost on Actian. And all of these solutions that we bring together enable that real time analysis of what's happening in every part of the environment. So, it's hybrid in terms of the type of data that you're working with. It's hybrid in terms of it could be generated in the cloud, in any cloud or on-premise, and being able to pull all of that together an perform real time analysis is incredibly important to generate value from the data. >> Emma, I want to get your thoughts on a comment that I heard last night and then multiple times but the same pattern, they don't get it. "They" could be the venture capitalists as part of the startup. Or the customer has, "Oh, this is the way we do it." There's definitely things that are out there Silo's Legacy things that are-- Still not going away, and we know that. But how do you go into a customer saying look, there's a whole new way of doing things right now. It's not necessarily radical lift and shift or rip and replace. Whatever word you want to use. There's always a word that, you don't like rip and replace, we'll say lift and shift. It's the same thing, right? >> Right. >> You don't want to do a lot of incremental operational wholesale changes. >> Right. >> But you want to do incremental value now. How do you go in and say, "Look, this is the way you want to think about real time in your architecture." Because I don't necessarily want to change my operational mindset for the sake of Salesforce and all these different data sources. How do you guys have that conversation? >> So, Actian is unique in that we have a consumer base that goes back 20, 30 years. I personally will be at Actian 25 years in December. So, we've got customers that are running our I'd like to call them Legacy products, but they're products that powering their business every day of the week. And we've also got incredibly innovative product that we're on the bleeding edge. And what we've done in our recent release of Actian X is do combined bleeding edge technology with this more mature and proven technology. So, at Actian X you've got the OLTP database that was Ingres and now got rebranded because it's got new capabilities. And then we've taken the engine from Actian Vector product, and brought that into Actian X so that you can do in real time analysis of your OLTP data. And we act in real time to changes in the data. And it's interesting that you talk about real time because it means different things to different people. So, if you're talking to somebody doing risk analysis, real time is milliseconds. If you're talking to some customers, real time is yesterday's data and that's fine. And what we've done with Actian X is to provide that ability to determine for yourself what real time means to you and to provide a solution that enables you to respond in real time. Now, bringing analytics into what is a more traditional OLTP database, and kind of demonstrating for them some of the new capabilities it enables and opens up other opportunities as far as we can have conversations about maybe backing up that dataset to the cloud. Somebody that may have been risk averse and not looking at cloud all of a sudden is looking at cloud, looking at analytics, and then kind of opening up new opportunities for us. And new opportunities for them cause the data, as they say, is the new oil. >> That's great, great. And you guys have a good customer base to draw from. So, you've got to bring in the shiny new toy but make it work with existing. So, it sounds like you been like an extraction layer that you're building on tech that was very useful and is useful, by decoupling it with new software that adds value. Is it an extraction layer of sorts? >> We don't think of it as an extraction layer but certainly one could think of it that way because it's ... Well, yeah it's-- >> John: It's a product. You basically take the old product and bring new stuff to it. >> Exactly. >> Okay, so I got to ask you about the trend around IOT. Because IOT is one of those things right now that's super hype. And I think it's going to be even more hype. But security has been a big problem and I hear a lot honestly, certainly IOTs on the agenda. Industrial IOT is kind of the low-hanging fruit. They go to that first. But no one wants to be the next Equifax. So, there's a lot of security stuff that causes, plus there's other things going on they got to take care of. How do you guys talk about the security equation where you can come in and put in a reliable workable solution and still make the customer's feel like they're moving the ball down the field. >> So, that's one of the benefits that we have of being in the industry for as long as we have. We have very deep understanding as to what security requirements are. In terms of providing capabilities within the product to do things like control who can access what data and to what degree. Can they update it? Can they only read it? Providing the ability to encrypt the data. So, for many usecases the data is so sensitive that you'd always want to encrypt it when it's stored. You'd want any traffic coming in and out of the environment to be encrypted. Being able to audit everything that's happening in the environment, who's issuing what queries and from where and to set alarms or something if somebody attempts to access data that they shouldn't be attempting to access. So, taking all of those capabilities together, we're then able to look at things like GDPR. What are the requirements for securing the data? And we've got all the capabilities within the product. And we've got the credibility cause we've been doing this for 30 years, that we can secure these environments. We can conform to the various standards and mandates that are put in place for data security. So, we have a very strong story to tell-- >> John: What is your position >> John: On GDPR? Obviously, you've got a super important, I call it the Y2K that actually is real cause you have there compliance issues. There's a lot of, obviously, political things going on but this is a real problem, about to move fast as a solution. What are you guys offer there? >> Equifax was a prime example of why GDPR is incredibly important. So, for Actian, and you know, I talked about the capabilities we provide with regard to securing data, and secure access to that data. And when it comes to GDPR, a lot of it is around process. So, what we're doing is guiding our customers and making sure that they have secure processes in place. Putting all of the smarts into the technology, and then having somebody doing an offline backup on a CD that they leave on a seat on the train which has, in the past, been a source of data breeches, is an issue with process and not with technology. So, we're helping with that. And helping in educating-- >> John: Equifax had some >> BPN issues but also, I mean, I haven't reported on this yet also have confirmed that there were state actors involved, foreign actors penetrating in through their franchise relationships. So, in partnering in an open internet these days you need to understand who the partners are even if they're in the network. >> Absolutely. And that's why this whole idea of providing all of the capabilities required for data security including auditing, who's coming in. So, failed attempts to get into the system should be reported as problems. And that's a capability that we have within the database. >> So, you've been at Actian for 25 years, I did not know. That's cool. Good folks over there. I've been to the office a few times. I'm sure you got a good healthy customer base but for the folks that don't know Actian. What's the pitch from your standpoint? Not the marketing pitch hybrid data, I get that. I mean, what should they know about you guys. What is the problem that you saw? What do you bring to the table? From an engineering perspective, how do you differentiate? >> So, my primary focus is around high-speed analytics. And so, Actian enables the fastest SQL access to data, on Hadoop and off of Hadoop, proven through benchmarks. So, high-speed analytics is incredibly important. But for Actian, we're unique in having this 30 year history where we understand what it is to run 24/7, mission critical operational databases. So, Actian's known for products like Ingres, like Psql, and being able to analyze data that's operationalized but then also bringing in new data sources. Cause that's where things are really going. But people want to choose the best application whether it's in the cloud or on-premise, it doesn't matter. It's the best application for their need. And being able to pull all of that data together, and for operational purposes, and for analytics purposes is incredibly important. And Actian enables all of that. >> And that's where the hybrid is really clever and smart because you got the consumption side and the creation side, and data integration isn't a project, it's real. It just happens. >> Emma: Right. >> So, you want to enable that. I can see that would be a key benefit. Certainly as, whether these decentralized apps get more traction, you're going to start to see more immutable things transactions happening. Blockchain clearly points to that direction of the market where that's cool. Distributed computing has been around for awhile but now decentralized we know how to behave there. So, we're seeing some apps that will probably be rewritten for that. But again, if architected properly that should be a problem. >> Right, exactly. And we don't want anybody to have to rewrite apps. What we want to be able to do is to provide a platform where the data that you need is available. >> John: Yeah, they're called Dapps for decentralized apps. It's a whole new wave coming, it's not being talked about here at the show. We are on, obviously, at Silicon Angle and Wikibon are those trends as we're riding the big wave. Okay, Em, I want to ask you a final question. Kind of take your Actian hat off, put your Irish techie hat on, and let's get down and dirty on what the main problem in the industry is right now. If you look back and kind of go to the balcony if you will, look at the stage of the industry, obviously Hadoop is now in the background. It's an element of the bigger picture. We're seeing, we were commenting yesterday that these customers have these tool sheds of all these tools they've bought. They bought a hammer that wants to be a lawnmower, right? It's just like they have their tool platforms are being pitched at them. There's a lot of confusion. What's the main problem that the industry's trying to solve? If you look at it, if you can put the dots together. What is the big problem that needs to be solved, that the industry should be solving? >> So, I think data is every place, right? And there's not a whole lot of discipline around corralling that and putting security around it. Being able to deploy security policies across data regardless of where it's deployed or sourced. So, I think that's probably the biggest challenge is bringing compute to the data and pulling all of that together. And that's the challenge that we're addressing. >> And so, the unification, if you will, people use that word, all unifying data. What does that actually mean? You guys call it hybrid data which means you have some flexibility if you need it. >> Emma: Right. >> All right, cool. Emma, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success. And again, you guys got to a good spot. You got a broad portfolio, you're bringing together with hybrid data. Best of luck. We'll keep in touch. Emma McGrattan here, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Actian here on theCUBE. More live coverage here in New York City from theCUBE's coverage of Big Data NYC after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to VMworld 2017, you are watching theCUBE, we have had a very exciting day one I am Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante And we'd like to welcome our next two guests, Tim Breeden, senior director of data management software at Dell EM, welcome to theCUBE! >> Nice to be here, thank you! >> And, Cell Demasey, director of data protection solutions from Teknicore! >> Hello! >> We're excited to have you guys here, I think we've all discussed, we've all had about a similar amount of caffeine today so this is good. So, Tim, first question to you, saw some big announcements today on day one data protection suite for apps, what is that, what announced, and how does it differentiate Dell EMC? >> Yeah, very exciting, so if I fall into saying DPS, perhaps you'll have to forgive me, it's kind of the vernacular, but what that does is it's the culmination of a lot of hard work, in particular, with VMware products, providing some differentiation, certainly around backup performance, and further automation across the entire VMware stack itself, so a huge differentiator for what we're selling now against traditional sort of deployments is an automation, and to end in the stack from your control to your data path right through, to the back-end storage. And then of course, today we announced that with AWS cloud, Dell EMC and VMware clouds partner, and Dell EMC being the first partner, with AWS in that regard. >> So data by its very nature is quite distributed, so what I hear, you know, you can basically protect anything anywhere, I get excited, so is that the underpinning of the philosophy? I wondered if we could talk a little more about that. >> Yes, we want to be able to protect anything, anywhere, we also want to be able to find anything anywhere, so if you put our product in your environment, you say, hey, I have a lot of stuff, to just sort of point us in the right direction, we'll go and find it, and we can automate protecting it, so that it's not, again I kind of pull it back to the previous, way, the traditional way, that deployments have happened in data protection, if a new VM, a new VMware VM pops up, we can simply discover it, add it to a protective group and your data protection is there so again, comes back to the automation so find it everywhere, protect it everywhere. >> How far do you take that today and even in your vision in terms of, I mean, you see a cloud, sas clouds popping up everywhere, I sometimes get concerned in our own organization about how we protect things, the data in this application versus this application, what if something goes wrong, what if we want to switch gas providers, can you help me with that problem? >> Yeah, and that's part of the evolution of VPS perhaps, right now as some folks know, kind of a start but there's cloud tier and data domain itself, that we can exploit, but you know right now if you think of the applications, the application governance, the VMware support, the self service model that we have, it's the natural next extension into the cloud, not only protecting to the cloud, but those cloud-native applications that we protect as well. >> Well Sal, what if we could talk about your organization, as a Dell EMC partner, long time EMC partner, what's happening with your company, and your customer base? >> Sure, thanks, so Teknicor is just about 10 years old, we've always only been a, well, most recently a Dell EMC partner but traditionally EMC only partner, and it's been a very good relationship thus far, our company started off with a healthcare only practice where we specialize in the metatechs base, but we've grown into all verticals of the market, so, you know, commercial, higher ed utility companies, pretty much wherever customers find a need, we're there for them to help them through it. >> You guys have a great, some great use cases on your website, I was particularly interested in the one with the Royal Victoria Regional Health Center. Knowing HIPAA in the States, there's obviously other requirements in Canada, and patient data being so sensitive, tell us a little bit about some of the business outcomes that RVH is leveraging using the Dell EMC technology provided by Teknicor. >> Sure, so Royal Victoria Hospital, they're a fantastic customer. Prior to Teknicor being engaged with them they were there running a lot of old antiquated hardware and software, which you know, up until the last couple years was doing well for them, but you know, now in these days IT and the business, they're best friends, right, IT's been enabling businesses to generate revenue, to provide better base and care, better expectations, so we help them pretty much transform their whole data center into a modernized data center where we used data protection suite for VMware to dramatically improve their back-up speeds, being a metatech integrated, certified integrator, we were able to transform a lot of their metatech workloads onto modernized flash-based technologies. And, really change the way they offer care to their patients through faster x-rays, faster back-ups of VMs that developers could use for RND and just an overall much more better experience, not only for the business, but for the customer, that which are the patients. >> Excellent. >> Tim, how do you look at your portfolio from an engineering standpoint? You got a vast portfolio, EMC, now Dell EMC. What's the strategy from an engineering standpoint to bring all those pieces together? >> Yeah, there's definitely a best of both worlds sort of synergy in combining all of these things, right, I mean you've got EMC with a heritage from storage and the data protection, very established over time. Yeah, Dell brings to the mix a few things, but one is their strong hardware server, you know, technology there as well, we're the exploration of how does the data protection software necessarily fit with that? How do we put these things together? One thing is for sure is from an engineering standpoint, it takes a little bit of time to figure it out but there's always that excitement sort of sitting out there that you want to jump into, but I think overall, we've got continued opportunity, with that to go right to what Sal's talking about here, the RV8 sounded like a customer in desperate need of that SDDC, Software Defined Data Center, right? So we've placed that bet on things some years ago, and now we're seeing it all come to fruition, you know with a more implicit scaling capability and performance scale ability, so I think that the goodness of the Dell presence, and wanting to be number one in everything combining with the CMT, VMC skillset and technology and proven team, that between the hardware and the software Dell EMC is a fantastic opportunity. >> One of the things we talked about before is that data protection is not just an IT problem it's a business problem. How to you guys work with, and maybe you both can answer this question, being customer facing, how to you work with IT and the business to align, to really, with RVH is an example, really show the business, the impact that multiple copies and proliferation are making, how does that alignment, how do you help with that? >> Well, the largest challenge customers face, not only in the healthcare space, but in every other vertical is the ever growing number of virtual machines in an environment. Every time there's a virtual machine, it's of some importance, it needs to be protected, the business expects everything to be protected, they expect everything to be retained for extraordinary amounts of time, and the way we found a way to provide a solid message to customers is to show customers the value of the cost to serve model, that data protection solutions by Dell EMC offer them. So you know, lowest cost per terabyte for storage, fastest times for recovery, the ability to manage the data through a life cycle, move it to different places, different ways, you know, offering the business flexibility and peace of mind at a value, in terms of cost is what they react to the most. >> How about the whole channel dynamic, when Dell announced that it was acquiring EMC you guys announced the deal, as always, the channel freaked out a little bit, and then there was, you know, some concern, some friction, I think just last week Michael Dell was on the cover of CRN, with some real kudos as to how that was figured out. I wonder, Sal, if you could take us through sort of what your experience was. >> Sure so, in all honesty, it's been a pretty seamless move over, we're really impressed, you know, there's always this slight hiccup here and there, with that kind of transition, but overall, it's been a good experience, at least for Teknicor it has. We, a lot of us being familiar with the not only internal EMC processes but Dell processes before they became one helped us become a little more, adapting to the situation, but we've not only feel that it's better, it's overall a much more positive experience because of what Dell brings to the table now, with the merger so. >> And the disruption to your processes has not been an issue >> No, not al all. whatsoever. >> The mindset of Dell is you know, huge volume EMC, very high touch, even though you're a massive company, but you haven't seen any effects of that. >> No, I think Dell, which is now Dell EMC, they've done a really good job at understanding the legacy EMC experienced, and making sure they didn't deviate far from that when they became one company, so they strategically made sure that these people, from this organization are still going to be involved, they're still going to be the ones you go to and then as time moves along, they're finding different ways to improve processes and overall partner experience. >> Excellent, well, congratulations on your continued partnership with Dell EMC, Tim, congratulations on the data protection suite for apps. >> Thank you so much. >> Lisa: The differentiation there. We thank you both for spending time with us on theCUBE today. >> All: Thank you, thanks. >> And for my co-host, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live, from day one of VMworld 2017, stick around, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here in Orlando at the Knowledge conference. Knowledge 17, ServiceNow's big customer show, and that's one of the things Jeff and I, Jeff Frick my co-host and I'm Dave Vellante like about Knowledge is we get to talk to the practitioners, the customers, the doers Naresh Samlal is here, he's the director of mobility and process automation at VITAS Healthcare. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Ah, I am glad to be here thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Tell us about VITAS. What's the organization about >> So VITAS is the largest hospice and palliative care provider in the country. What's unique about our business is that our patient care staff is really in the field. They're not bounded by four walls as compared to a typical healthcare provider. So our nurses, our chaplains, physicians and so forth go to the homes of our patients and being in hospice that, you know, our... We truly believe that Your best care is delivered in your own home, and so that's VITAS's directive is to really deliver that care in their home. Which really creates for a unique setting in managing you know, logistics and the staffing around that whole solution. But we've done it really well for 30 years and, you know we're looking forward to a great future with that. >> Well it's a really important service. Obviously, you know, families and loved ones can be together, and gather in very difficult times. Now in the past 30 years technology has changed quite a bit. How has that affected your business? >> Yes, that's a great question. In many ways, technology at VITAS has not changed. And so a lot of things that we have done historically have been... And still today there's many things that are still the same because that's what works and at the end of the day this fight, leveraging technology, the sensitive time in someone's life really needs that personal interaction and technology can't substitute that. However, we always are challenging ourselves to make that interaction more efficient with technology. So most recently, actually last year, we completed a deployment of 8,000 mobile devices to our patient care staff. So our nurses prior to this rollout walked around with 25 pounds of paper. They were traveling from their homes to our patients' homes, to our offices back and forth with paper, they didn't have access, real time access, to patient records like they do today. We replaced an entire binder with a mobile device. >> Dave: I was going to say these things change the world right? >> With an iPhone. Absolutely. >> So how many how many stops did it, you know, just a little bit of that kind of, their workflow how many stops a day do they make, kind of, what's kind of the scope of that? >> So that's a great question Um, they may, they'll have a starting point in a day, they know where their first patient they don't know where their last patient or how many they're going to see that day. So it could vary. It could be, you know five, it could be up to ten. And it varies based on the need, based on what that visit calls for. So it really varies and being able to have realtime information now and be more flexible and more efficient with these devices we're really able to allow them to give better care and more care quite frankly. >> Jeff: Right. >> So take us through the sort of case example of how you brought in ServiceNow Where's the driver and how did it change your organization. >> So there's quite a bit of efficiency and I talked about how the business has not changed very much over the course of time. But mobile devices as it relates to mobility and VITAS we really saw an opportunity to leverage the staff that we have to do more with them and give them the ability to give better care and not have to worry about the administrative aspects that come with that. For example, today they're able to access our EMR so they patient data right on their mobile device they can order drugs for our patients right on their mobile device. They can enter their time, their traveling, all these logistics that they weren't able to do they had to literally leave their home, go to a patient, go back to our main office or program office in that location, scan any documents they need to scan, enter any time, do some administrative stuff, go back out, that's kind of what the day looked like and so now with these devices we're able to free them up from having that extra travel. There's obviously a lot of cost saving opportunities around that, but it really allowed for, it allows for a nurse and a patient caregiver to maybe be able to see a patient, one patient more, two patients more in a day so that really transforms our business and really at the end of the day it's really going to allow VITAS to provide care because we believe we provide the best care in hospice and palliative care. You know, we feel that if you're not with VITAS you're not getting the best care and this really allows us to really see that through and position ourselves to deliver more. >> So where did you start with ServiceNow? >> So ServiceNow was actually introduced on the ITSM side so we brought it in to really fix our ticketing system get it up to, you know where it needed to be at the very least and out of that there was a parallel opportunity for us at management. So mobility was in its very infancy at the time. We knew we wanted to do it, we knew it could happen, we knew the benefits of it, but the reality of it was a little bit farfetched. Right? And so ServiceNow combined with a few other partners that we work with, really bringing that together and finding that secret sauce, and finding the right recipe for making that work allowed us to do this. One of the biggest things with managing so many devices and them being mobile, you know, physically off our premises is not knowing where they are, right? You know they don't actually hold patient data but there's some risk around security and exposing that so losing these devices, them getting in the wrong hands, was really important for us. So we really needed to first and foremost know where all our devices are at any given moment. Coupled with a few other pieces that work well with ServiceNow we now have that single pane of glass that we can really know exactly where the devices are, manage them in real time, we are able to tie our financial data right back to them so we're able to really get the full visibility of what mobility looks like and ServiceNow is at the core of that. They're at the center, we bring everything back into ServiceNow so we have one place to go manage our data, share and really, you know, be effective with it. >> So the data, the patient data, lives in the cloud? Is that right? >> So, essentially yes. So no data actually lives on the device, it's all a matter of the device being able to access the cloud. So through wifi, if they're at a hospital or if they're at a patient's home, or LTE coverage. >> And it used to live in paper that somehow got scanned, right? Which... >> I can't imagine, 'cause they don't know what the route is so now I assume they go to their first stop, it's got all that patient ABC, they finish, check in, I'm done, and then, where am I going next, get the data. >> I'm glad you brought that up, and so today they're able to access that information and I think part of the next step as to where VITAS is going is to really systematically tell them okay this is probably your next stop and not with a phone call to find out if they're available to do that but systematically know that they're available, when they're going to be available, and set them up with that information. And so that's really where we're looking to next. For mobility and technology at VITAS. >> What about all the, the compliance, the Affordable Care Act, EM, you had mentioned EMR, meaningful use, I mean all these things that you have to worry, HIPAA, maybe the potential unwinding of the Affordable Care Act, or maybe the evolution of it, I mean all these things you got to keep track of, where does that fit? >> So another great point, you know, one of the things, one of the things is, hospice is or end of life care really consumes about 30% of one's cost throughout their life. Most people don't realize that. That's your most expensive time in your life, in your cycle, that's going to go to what's healthcare. And that's where VITAS is very sensitive. And the other thing to note is that the average patient with VITAS is with us for two weeks. So timing is everything. >> Jeff: Two weeks. >> Yes. >> Dave: Yeah, short time. >> Right, so it gives... >> Jeff: And how many visits? What's the average number of visits in that two weeks? >> So we have 16,000 patients on our uh... >> No I mean for that particular, I mean what's kind of your average visits per patient over that two weeks? >> That may vary, depends on the patient, and this is average, right? So that may vary, sometimes it's 24/7 care other times it may be a couple times a day other times maybe once a day. And it really depends >> Dave: Okay, and so it's typically at least once a day, right? >> At least once a day, right. So that's not uncommon. So going back to your question, these things all come into play where as an organization, we feel the effects of regulation changes, right and that impacts our financials as well, so mobility, bringing mobility to the table with the help of ServiceNow and these other players that we make this work really helps us realize these efficiencies. Which at the end of the day, this is how we're able to really stay afloat in those areas and really not feel the impacts quite frankly. And if you look at our last quarter, we thrive. >> Yeah I mean and get paid on time, and not have to go back and forth, back and forth >> Well even like audit I would imagine I mean does the GPS data that demonstrates that your people were there, you know figure back into audits and all kinds of stuff I would imagine >> Right, and we are heavily audited with our devices as well. I mean they're very sensitive You got to think about it too, mobility and such a paradigm shift for a company like VITAS was and is very scrutinized, right? We spend a considerable amount of money in this program. We also see a lot of returns on it. But, it's a very different approach for folks that have done things a certain way for a really long time, right, so you talk about audits, going back to financials ServiceNow really allows us to stay really close to that. Be really tight, and speak with confidence when we provide our data, right, so our CFO is very sensitive to that and in a moment's notice we are able to respond to his request for last week's financials, last month's, what is our loss rate? You know, things like that just wasn't, we didn't have access to that type of date before. And quite frankly it's not something that's very common So most organizations see mobility I would have to say more as a luxury compared to how VITAS uses it today Today, this device is the clinical workstation at VITAS This is how our patient care staff works. This allows them to be productive. It's not a luxury. >> And how often do they come back to the barn, just to come back to the barn so they can get, they're you know, in the field most of the time actually working. >> So at the very least they may come back, they'll come back once a week now for a team meeting versus much more frequent for administrative work. Right? So that's had a tremendous impact on them. >> And how long ago again did you kind of roll out the solution? >> So we completed the rollout to the full audience at the end of last year so Q4 of last year so we've been at full feet for two quarters now and we're, and that really was setting the stage for what's to come next, right, so we're in the middle of rolling out an application right now which is going to allow our patient care staff to order drugs so our physicians and nurses can submit the request for drugs, and like items to treat our patients where as before, what that looked like was them having to leave the patient's house, run to the store, come back, or do a mail order request for drugs. So today... >> And will that be in the ServiceNow app or are you using ServiceNow to kind of manage everything and that's a separate kind of an app? >> Did you guys develop that app on top of ServiceNow or... >> We, so that is isolated from ServiceNow today, but we're standing it up as is, however that's something that we're actually considering looking at ServiceNow to see how we can play in that space as well because ServiceNow has done a lot for us, right we know it's a fantastic tool. We've used it in ways that are unconventional and we continue to do that. So part of, a lot of why we're here this week is to really capitalize on how they help us too. And so we're embarking on the journey program with ServiceNow to really look at how we can transform our business even further and opportunities like this really play a role into that. >> And so are you developing apps on ServiceNow or >> So we do have custom apps on ServiceNow, today they're very, you know, they're quick wins internally they really don't extend towards business they're more internal to IT, but that's really what the next phase of what we're looking at is how does ServiceNow really impact our business and our business processes, right, that's really our next step. >> And we can, can we differentiate just for my own edification, custom apps versus custom modifications, right? Those are two different things right? >> Configurations, right? >> Custom apps, you're building an app on top of the platform, what about custom mods, are you avoiding those at all costs? >> So, I can't say we're avoiding them at all costs and you really can't. You have to have some customization. We try to limit those so we can take on upgrades and take on, and be swift with all the new features that they bring on. So we're one version behind by, you know by design, and so, we're able to consume that as fast as they are able to release it because of our light customization. We try to stay out of the box. >> When you upgrade, do you test... So you're what in -1? >> Right. >> Okay, do you always upgrade to the next version, do you sometimes leapfrog? >> I have not had to leapfrog yet, so we've been pretty good about that and I plan to stick hard into that. >> So help us understand some maybe advice for other customers is you don't really want to leapfrog if you don't have to but sometimes you have to because you're too late in the upgrade cycle, is that right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so. >> I mean, it's not ideal because you introduce a lot of unknowns if you have to leapfrog, right and ServiceNow, let me say this to your service, the upgrade process with ServiceNow has been unlike anything, any other upgrade process I've been through of any software. >> Dave: In what sense? >> It's been smooth, we've had very little issues coming out of it, we do full regression testing, but our findings are always very minimal, but the actual upgrade process is short, it's effective, it works, it's very informative, and they're getting even better at that, so for, you know that gives us a lot of peace of mind that we have a stable platform that we can really build and thrive on. >> How many upgrades have you gone through? >> We've done three so far? >> Okay >> What is short, Naresh with how long... >> I'm, you know I've done, I've seen inside of an hour at times, so our instance, we're two years into ServiceNow so we don't have you know, massive amount of data like maybe other companies do. We have substantial data there, but they're pretty quick I've seen an hour to do an upgrade. >> And how disruptive is an upgrade? >> Not at all. Here's one of my favorite parts about the upgrade is I don't have to announce that we're doing an upgrade to the general population. >> (laughs) >> Okay, they don't even know. >> That's a good indicator. >> They don't know. They're actually working in it while it's being upgraded. They log off, log back on, new version. Right? So I've been able to consume these upgrades as fast and as easily as I'm talking about. So I did one thing that was probably different than most people are doing. I'm suppressing the UI upgrade, and taking the platform upgrade, so the look and feel stays the same, and so we're in the middle of a program right now to relaunch ServiceNow with a new look and feel, new branding, just give it a whole new facelift, that's when I'm going to release the new UI. That's when we're going to give it... >> Jeff: But you really separate the skinning and the UI from the underlying platform. >> Yeah and you're allowed to do that, right? That's one of the points about it. >> And the UI changes, not on every cycle, is that correct? I mean it just changes periodically right? >> It's periodically. There's been subtle changes, and then there's been you know, full revamp for the better, but for the most part we're able to consume it and stay current with it because, you know, we can contain it that much. >> Yeah but it's different and then the user says oh, you know even like you know, crappy Gmail when they changed the, like oh it's new. >> You got to learn it all over again, you don't like it, it grows on you, well, you know we can control that now. We don't have to like, react to it every time. >> And the strategy to be in -1 is, can you explain that? What's the logic behind that? >> Yeah absolutely, so there's constantly a ton of new features. ServiceNow is learning from us and from many customers and really being reactive to that. And so I want that whatever we have and we're trying to do we're getting, we have access to the latest and greatest, and we don't have to go build something if I know it's there It also helps us identify and plug gaps in our system, so, in our processes. So, for example, we may know we have a host of different things that we need to regularly work on. Consuming an upgrade and it being so simple as just turning something on or just start using it means I can get to be more efficient quicker rather than having to put that on a priority list and get focused, and get a project going, and get a team behind it, it's just more consumable that way and we're able to be more agile, and improve quicker as well. So that's one of the reasons I like doing upgrades and staying current with it. >> Alright Naresh, thanks very much for coming onto The Cube, I appreciate you sharing >> I appreciate it, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest... (applause) Thank you! Right after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts. Day villain Day >> and stew Minimum. We're back. Welcome to Boston, Everybody. This is the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. This is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Inderpal. Bhandari is here. He's the newly appointed chief data officer at IBM. He's joined, but joined by Bob Picciano who is the senior vice president of IBM Analytics Group. Bob. Great to see again Inderpal. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. So good event, Bob, Let's start with you. Um, you guys have been on the chief data officer kicked for several years now. You ahead of the curve. What, are you trying to achieve it? That this event? Yes. So, >> Dave, thanks again for having us here. And thanks for being here is well, tto help your audience share in what we're doing here. We've always appreciated that your commitment to help in the the masses understand all the important pulses that are going on the industry. What we're doing here is we're really moderating form between chief date officers on. We started this really on the curve. As you said 2014, where the conference was pretty small, there were some people who were actually examining the role, thinking about becoming a chief did officer. We probably had a few formal cheap date officers we're talking about, you know, maybe 100 or so people who are participating in the very 1st 1 Now you can see it's not, You know, it's it's grown much larger. We have hundreds of people, and we're doing it multiple times a year in multiple cities. But what we're really doing is bringing together a moderated form, Um, and it's a privilege to be able to do this. Uh, this is not about selling anything to anybody. This is about exchanging ideas, understanding. You know what, the challenges of the role of the opportunities which changing about the role, what's changing about the market and the landscape, what new risks might be on the horizon? What new opportunities might be on the horizon on we you know, we really liketo listen very closely to what's going on so we can, you know, maybe build better approach is to help their mother. That's through the services we provide or whether that's through the cloud capabilities were offering or whether that's new products and services that need to be developed. And so it gives us a great understanding. And we're really fortunate to have our chief data officer here, Interpol, who's doing a great job in IBM and in helping us on our mission around really becoming a cognitive enterprise and making analytics and insight on data really be central to that transformation. >> So, Dr Bhandari, new, uh, new to the chief date officer role, not nude. IBM. You worked here and came back. I was first exposed to roll maybe 45 years ago with the chief Data officer event. OK, so you come in is the chief data officer in December. Where do you start? >> So, you know, I've had the fortune of being in this role for a long time. I was one of the earliest created, the role for healthcare in two thousand six. Then I have honed that roll over three different Steve Data officer appointments at health care companies. And now I'm at IBM. So I do have, you know, I do view with the job as a craft. So it's a practitioner job and there's a craft to it. And do I answer your question? There are five things that you have to do to get moving on the job, and three of those have to be non sequentially and to must be done and powerful but everything else. So the five alarm. The first thing is you've got to develop a data strategy and data strategy is around, is focused around having an understanding ofthe how the company monetize is or plans to monetize itself. You know, what is the strategic monetization part of the company? Not so much how it monetize is data. But what is it trying to do? How is it going to make money in the future? So in the case of IBM, it's all around cognition. It's around enabling customers to become cognitive businesses. So my data strategy or our data strategy, I should say, is focused on enabling cognition becoming a cauldron of enterprise. You know, we've now realized that impacto prerequisite for cognition. So that's the data strategy piece. And that's the very first thing that needs to be done because once you understand that, then you understand what data is critical for the company, so you don't boil the ocean instead, what you do is you begin to govern exactly what's necessary and make sure it's fit for purpose. And then you can also create trusted data sources around those critical data assets that are critical for the for the monetization strategy of the company's. Those three have to go in sequence because if you don't know what you can do to adequately kind of three, and they're also significant pitfalls if you don't follow that sequence because you can end up pointing the ocean and the other two activities that must be done concurrently. One is in terms ofthe establishing deep partnerships with the other areas of the company the key business units, the key functional units because that's how you end up understanding what that data strategy ought to be. You know, if you don't have that knowledge of the company by making that effort that due diligence, that it's very difficult to get the data strategy right, so you've got to establish those partnerships and then the 5th 1 is because this is a space where you do require very significant talent. You have to start developing that talent and that all the organizational capability right from day one. >> So, Bob, you said that, uh, data is the new middle manager. You can't have an effective middle manager come unless you at least have some framework that was just described. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when Interpol talks about that fourth initiative about the engagement with the business units and making sure that we're in alignment on how the company's monetizing its value to its clients, his involvement with our team goes way beyond how he thinks about what date it is that we're collecting in the products that you're offering and what we might understand about our customers or about the marketplace. His involvement goes also into how we're curating the right user experience for who we want to win power with our products and offerings. Sometimes that's the role of the chief date officer. Sometimes that's the role of a data engineer. Sometimes it's the role of a data scientist. You mentioned data becoming the new middle management middle manager. We think the citizen analyst is ushering in that from from their seat, But we also need to be able to, from a perspective, to help them eliminate the long tail and and get transparency, the information. And sometimes it's the application developer. So we, uh, we collaborate on a very frequent basis, where, when we think about offering new capabilities to those roles, well, what's the data implication of that? What's the governance implication of that? How do we make it a seamless experience? So as people start to move down the path of igniting all of the innovation across those roles, there is a continuum to the information to using To be able to do that, how it's serving the enterprise, how it leads to that transformation to be a cognitive enterprise on DH. That's a very, very close collaboration >> we're moving from. You said you talked the process era to what I just inserted to an insight era. Yeah, um, and I have a question around that I'm not sure exactly how to formulate it, but maybe you can help. In the process, era technology was unknown. The process was very well, Don't know. Well known, but technology was mysterious. But with IBM and said help today it seems as though process is unknown. The technology's pretty known look at what uber airbnb you're doing the grabbing different technologies and putting them together. But the process is his new first of all, is that a reasonable observation? And if so, what does that mean for chief data officers? >> So the process is, you know, is new in the sense that in terms ofthe making it a cognitive process, it's going to end up being new, right? So the memorization that you >> never done it before, but it's never been done before, right >> in that sense. But it's different from process automation in the past. This is much more about knowledge, being able to scale knowledge, not just, you know, across one process, but across all the process cities that make up a company. And so in there. That goes also to the comment about data being the middle manager. I mean, if you've essentially got the ability to scale and manage knowledge, not just data but knowledge in terms of the insights that the people who are working these processes are coming up in conjunction with these data and intelligent capabilities, that that that that that of the hub right, it's the intelligence system that's had the Hubble this that's enabling all that so that That's really what leads Teo leads to the so called civilization >> way had dates to another >> important aspect of this is the process is dramatically different in the sense that it's ongoing. It's it's continuous, right, the process and your intimacy with uber and the trust that you're developing. A brand doesn't start and stop with one transaction and actually, you know branches into many different things. So your expectations, a CZ that relationships have all changed. So what they need to understand about you, what they need to protect about you, how they need to protect you in their transformation, the richness of their service needs to continue to evolve. So how they perform that task on the abundance of information they have available to perform that task. But the difficulty of being able to really consume it and make use of it is is a change. The other thing is, it's a lot more conversational, right? So the process isn't a deterministic set of steps that someone at a desk can really formulate in a business rule or a static process. It's conversationally changes. It needs to be dis ambiguity, and it needs to introduce new information during the process of disintegration. And that really, really calls upon the capabilities of a cognitive system that is rich and its ability to understand and interact with natural language to potentially introduce other sources of rich information. Because you might take a picture about what you're experiencing and all those things change that that notion from process to the conversational element. >> Dr. Bhandari, you've got an interesting role. Companies like IBM I think about the Theo with the CDO. Not only do you have your internal role, but you're also you know, a model for people going out there. You come too. Events like this. You're trying to help people in the role you've been a CDO. It's, um, health care organization to tell Yu know what's different about being kind of internal role of IBM. What kind of things? IBM Obviously, you know, strong technology culture, But tell us a little bit inside. You've learned what anything surprise you. You know, in your time that you've been doing it. >> Oh, you know, over the course ofthe time that I've been doing the roll across four different organizations, >> I guess specifically at IBM. But what's different there? >> You know, I mean IBM, for one thing, is a the The environment has tremendous scale. And if you're essentially talking about taking cognition to the enterprise, that gives us a tremendous A desperate to try out all the capabilities that were basically offering to our to our customers and to home that in the context of our own enterprise, you know, to build our own cognitive enterprise. And that's the journey that way, sharing with our with our customers and so forth. So that's that's different in in in in it. That wasn't the case in the previous previous rules that I had. And I think the other aspect that's different is the complexity of the organisation. This is a large global organization that wasn't true off the previous roles as well. They were Muchmore, not America century, you know, organizations. And so there's a There's an aspect there that also then that's complexity of the role in terms ofthe having to deal with different countries, different languages, different regulations, it just becomes much more complex. >> You first became a CDO in two thousand six, You said two thousand six, which was the same year as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure came out and the emails became smoking guns. And then it was data viewed as a liability, and now it's completely viewed as an asset. But traditionally the CDO role was financial services and health care and government and highly regulated businesses. And it's clearly now seeping into new industries. What's driving that? Is that that value? >> Well, it is. I mean, it's, I think, that understanding that. You know, there's a tremendous natural resource in in the information in the data. But there is, you know, very much you know, union Yang around that notion of being responsible. I mean, one of the things that we're very proud of is the type of trust that we established over 105 year journey with our clients in the types of interactions we have with one another, the level of intimacy that we have in their business and very foundation away, that we serve them on. So we can never, ever do anything to compromise that you know. So the focus on really providing the ability to do the necessary governance and to do the necessary data providence and lineage in cyber security while not stifling innovation and being able to push into the next horizon. Interpol mentioned the fact that IBM, in and of itself, we think of ourselves as a laboratory, a laboratory for cognitive information innovation, a laboratory for design and innovation, which is so necessary in the digital era. And I think we've done a really good job in the spaces, but we're constantly pushing the envelope. A good example of that is blockchain, a technology that you know sometimes people think about and nefarious circumstances about, You know, what it meant to the ability to launch a Silk Road or something of that nature. We looked at the innovation understanding quite a lot about it being one of the core interview innovators around it, and saw great promise in being able to transform the way people thought about, you know, clearing multiparty transactions and applied it to our own IBM credit organization To think about a very transparent hyper ledger, we could bring those multiple parties together. People could have transparency and the transactions have a great deal of access into that space, and in a very, very rapid amount of time, we're able to take our very sizable IBM credit organization and implement that hyper ledger. Also, while thinking about the data regulation, the data government's implications. I think that's a really >> That's absolutely right. I mean, I think you know, Bob mentioned the example about the IBM credit organizer Asian, but there is. There are implications far beyond that. Their applications far beyond that in the data space. You know, it affords us now the opportunity to bring together identity management. You know, the profiles that people create from data of security aspects and essentially combined all of these aspects into what will then really become a trusted source ofthe data. You know, by trusted by me, I don't mean internally, but trusted by the consumers off the data. The subject's off the data because you'll be able to do that much in a way that's absolutely appropriate, not just fit for business purpose, but also very, very respectful of the consent on DH. Those aspects the privacy aspect ofthe data. So Blockchain really is a critical technology. >> Hype alleges a great example. We're IBM edge this week. >> You're gonna be a world of Watson. >> We will be a world Watson. We had the CEO of ever ledger on and they basically brought 1,000,000 diamonds and bringing transparency for the diamond industry. It's it's fraught with, with fraud and theft and counterfeiting and >> helping preserve integrity, the industry and eliminating the blood diamonds. And they right. >> It's fascinating to see how you know this bitcoin. You know, when so many people disparaged it is a currency, but not just the currency. You know, you guys IBM saw that early on and obviously participated in the open source. Be, You know, the old saying follow the money with us is like follow the data. So if I understand correctly, your job, a CDO is to sort of super charge of the business lines with the data strategy. And then, Bob, you're job is the line of business managers the supercharge your customers, businesses with the data strategy. Is that right? Is that the right value >> chain? I think you nailed it. Yeah, that's >> one of the things people are struggling with these days is, you know, if they can get their own data in house, then they've also gotta deal with third party. That industry did everything like that. IBM's role in that data chain is really interesting. You talked this morning about kind of the Weather Channel and kind of the data play there. Yeah, you know what? What's IBM is rolling. They're going forward. >> It's one of the most exciting things. I think about how we've evolved our strategy. And, you know, we're very fortunate to have Jimmy at the helm. Who really understands, You know, that transformational landscape on DH, how partnerships really change the ability to innovate for the companies we serve on? It was very obvious in understanding our client's problems that while they had a wealth of information that we were dealing with internally, there was great promise and being able to introduce these outside signals. If you will insights from other sources of data, Sometimes I call them vectors of information that could really transform the way they were thinking about solving their customer problem. So, you know, why wouldn't you ever want to understand that customers sentiment about your brand or about the product or service? And as a consequence to that, you know, capabilities that are there on Twitter or we chat or line are essential to that, depending on where your brand is operating in your branch, probably operating in a multinational space anyway, so you have to listen to all those signals and they're all in multiple language and sentiment is very, very bespoke. It's a different language, so you have to apply sophisticated machine learning. We've invented new algorithms to understand how to glean the signal at all that white noise. You use the weather example as well. You know, we think about the economic impact of climate atmosphere, whether on business and its profound. It's 1/2 trillion dollars, you know, in each calendar year that are, you know, lost information, lost assets, lost opportunity, misplaced inventory, you know, un delivered inventory. And we think we can do a better job of helping our clients take the weather excuses out of business in a variety of different industries. And so we've focused our initiatives on that information integration, governance, understanding new analytics toe to introduce those outside signals directly in the heart and want to place it on the desk of the chief data officer of those who are innovating around information and data. >> My my joke last Columbus. If they was Dell's buying DMC, IBM is buying the weather company. What does What does that say? My question is Interpol. When when Emma happens. And Bob, when you go out and purchase companies that are data driven, what role does the chief data officer play in both em in a pre and post. >> So, you know, I think the one that there being a cop, just gonna touch on a couple of points that Bob Major and I'll address your question directly as well. Uh, in terms of the role of the chief data officer, I think you're giving me that question before how that's he walled. The one very interesting thing that's happening now with what IBM is doing is previously the chief data officer. All at least with regard to the data, Not so much the strategy, but the data itself was internal focused. You know, you kind of worried about the data you had in house or the data you're bringing in now you've gotta worry as much about the exogenous status and because, you know, that's so That's one way that that role has changed considerably and is changing and evolving, and it's creating new opportunities for us. The other is again. In the past, the chief state officer all was around creating a warehouse for analytics and separated out from the operational processes. That's changing, too, because now we've got to transform these processes themselves. So that's, you know, that's that's another expanded role to come back to. Acquisitions emanate. I mean, I view that as essentially another process that, you know, company has. And so the chief data officer role is pretty key in terms of enabling that world in terms ofthe data, but also in terms ofthe giving, you know, guidance and advice. If, for instance, the acquisition isn't that problem itself, then you know, then we would be more closely involved. But if it's beyond that in terms of being able to get the right data, do that process as well as then once you've acquired the company in being able to integrate back the critical data assets those out of the key aspect, it's an ongoing role. >> So you've got the simplest level. You've got data sources and all the things associated with that. And then you've got your algorithms and your machine learning, and we're moving beyond sort of do tow cut costs into this new era. But so hot Oh cos adjudicate. And I guess you got to do both. You've got to get new data sources and you've got to improve this continuous process. By that you talked about how do you guide your customers as to where they put their resource? No. And that's >> really Davis. You have, you know, touching out again. That's really the benefit of this sort of a forum. In this sort of a conference, it's sharing the best practices of how the top experts in the world are really wrestling with that and identifying. I think you know Interpol's framework. What do you do sequentially to build the disciplines, to build a solid corn foundation, to make the connections that are lined with the business strategy? And then what do you do concurrently along that model to continue to operate? And how do you How do you manage and make sure your stakeholders understand what's being done? What they need to continue to do to evolve the innovation and come join us here and we'll go through that in detail. But, you know, he deposited a greatjob sharing his framers of success, and I think in the other room, other CEOs are doing that now. >> Yeah, I just wanted to quickly add to Bob's comment. The framework that I described right? It has a check and balance built into it because if you are all about governance, then the Sirio role becomes very defensive in nature. It's all about making sure you within the hour, you know, within the guard rails and so forth. But you're not really moving forward in a strategic way to help the company. And and that's why you know, setting it up by driving it from the strategy don't just makes it easier to strike that plus >> clerical and more about innovation here. We talked about the D and CDO today meaning data, but really, I think about it is being a great crucible for for disruption in information because you've disruption off. I called the Chief Disruption Office under Sheriff you >> incident in Data's digitalis data. So there's that piece of Ava's Well, we have to go. I don't want to go. So that way one last question for each of you. So Interpol, uh, thinking about and you just kind of just touched on it. He's not just playing defense, you know, thinking more offense this role. Where do you want to take it. What do your you know, sort of mid term, long term goals with this role? >> It's the specific role in IBM or just in general specifically. Well, I think in the case of I B M, we have the data strategy pretty well defined. Now it's all about being able to enable a cognitive enterprise. And so in, You know, in my mind and 2 to 3 years, we'll have completely established how that ought to be done, you know, as a prescription. And we'll also have our clients essentially sharing in that in that journey so that they can go off and create cognitive enterprises themselves. So that's pretty well set. You know, I have a pretty short window to three years to make that make that happen, And I think it's it's doable. And I think it will be, you know, just just a tremendous transformation. >> Well, we're excited to be to be watching and documenting that Bob, I have to ask you a world of washing coming up. New name for new conference. We're trying to get Pepper on, trying to get Jimmy on. Say, what should we expect? Maybe could. Although it was >> coming, and I think this year we're sort of blowing the roof off on literally were getting so big that we had to move the venue. It is very much still in its core that multiple practitioner, that multiple industry event that you experienced with insight, right? So whether or not you're thinking about this and the auspices of managing your traditional environments and what you need to do to bring them into the future and how you tie these things together, that's there for you. All those great industry tracks around the product agendas and what's coming out are are there. But the level of inspiration and involvement around this cognitive innovation space is going to be front and center. We're joined by Ginny Rometty herself, who's going to be very special. Key note. We have, I think, an unprecedented lineup of industry leaders who were going to come and talk about disruption and about disruption in the cognitive era on then. And as always, the most valuable thing is the journeys that our clients are partners sharing with us about how we're leading this inflection point transformation, the industry. So I'm very much excited to see their and I hope that your audience joins us as well. >> Great. We'll Interpol. Congratulations on the new roll. Thank you. Get a couple could plug, block post out of your comments today, so I really appreciate that, Bob. Always a pleasure. Thanks so much for having us here. Really? Appreciate. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright. Keep right, everybody, this is the Cube will be back. This is the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. We're live from Boston. You're back. My name is Dave Volante on DH. I'm along.